


A Challenge to the Convention

by dewilde



Category: Titanic (1997)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Denial of Feelings, F/M, Historical Figures, Historical References, Older Man/Younger Woman, RMS Titanic, Romance, Slow Burn, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:01:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 62,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25568650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewilde/pseuds/dewilde
Summary: Seventeen-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater boards the luxurious new ocean liner theRMS Titanic,beginning a voyage home to America where she will be condemned to an arranged marriage to a man she does not love.While on the ship, she meets the architect ofTitanicherself, Thomas Andrews, and with new emotions brewing inside her, she finally finds the reason for which she will fight against a fate decided for her.
Relationships: Jack Dawson/Rose DeWitt Bukater, Jack Dawson/Tommy Ryan, Rose DeWitt Bukater/Caledon Hockley, Thomas Andrews/Rose Dewitt Bukater
Comments: 129
Kudos: 69





	1. The Ship of Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rose Dewitt Bukater boards the _RMS Titanic_ and meets some interesting characters, including a kindly Irish shipbuilder, and displays that she's not just any demure woman.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here I am again, my dears! Starting a new work about a relatively unpopular and unorthodox ship!  
> I recently rewatched _Titanic_ and I noticed what chemistry Mr. Andrews and Rose have! The looks and the touches, it's undeniable!
> 
> Obviously, Victor Garber’s AMAZING portrayal of Thomas Andrews and his insane chemistry with Kate Winslet prompted my writing this, but in my head, as I love both of them very dearly, I see a healthy mix of Victor’s Thomas and the real Thomas Andrews, but feel free to see whichever one you wish! <3 
> 
> I've never been a Jack/Rose shipper, it just seemed like teenage puppy love to me and I didn't see it lasting if the tragedy had not happened, but that's just me. That being said, there will be NO Jack bashing in here. I love him as a character, just not him with Rose. He'll still be included in this work. :)
> 
> I hope I'm able to bring some new goodness to those few souls out there who also ship Romas and maybe sway some people to see what I didn't see before! 
> 
> All my love to those who read! <3

Since the breaking of dawn on the 10th of April 1912, people of all shapes and sizes, young and old, First-Class and Second and Third, began to flood the dock at the Port of Southampton until it felt as though one could not move an inch without bumping into another.  
Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces of black and gold and burgundy, glinting like diamonds in the early morning light, carried the aristocrats, the elites and the well-to-dos to the _RMS Titanic_ while those of the Third-Class watched on in amazement as they stood in line, waiting for depressors to be shoved down their throats and combs yanked through their hair in search of lice.

It was one of these automobiles, one of startling ivory and black and adorned with gold, from which a white leathered hand was presented to the chauffeur at the opened door; a hand that moved slowly, evenly, lacking any sort of excitement at the destination or eagerness, one that simply moved as if it were a machine and it was its sole duty, much like the crank on the car in which such a hand sat ensconced. And from this machine-like hand appeared a lady, adorned in a white pinstriped suit, plum-colored wide-brimmed hat cantilevered over a face far older than that of her mere seventeen years.

She was unimpressed by the enthusiasm surrounding her—both the wild, untamed jumping and hooting of that of the steerage passengers and the sober, straight-backed, turgid praise of that of the higher classes—and even with a look upon the magnificent ship, the fastest, largest and most luxurious of her kind, her expression and opinions remained the same and steadfast, as fiery and stubborn as the hair piled upon her head.   
Her fiancé, a sober, imposing man, brimming with a simmering temper hidden just beneath his skin, bedecked in a grey suit and hat, stepped forth from the automobile and smiled up at the liner, a rare form of amazement in his eyes that she was always shocked to see when it possessed him, for Caledon Hockley usually took every advancement of man and machine no matter how great or pivotal as if it were a birthright for him to witness. And because of this, the spirited lady before him could not bear to let the opportunity to provoke him pass her by. 

“I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” she said, pointing her chin up and turning to Cal, straightening her back and looking into his eyes. “It doesn’t look any bigger than the _Mauretania.”_  
The man rolled his eyes, his happiness unaffected, and thus she burned within. “You can be blasé about some things, Rose, but not about _Titanic!”_ he pointed at the ship before them in question with his walking stick. “It’s over a hundred feet longer than _Mauretania_ and far more luxurious.”  
He turned to the car where his fiancee’s mother, pale and redheaded as her daughter, was stepping into the chilly April morning, and said, “Your daughter’s far too difficult to impress, Ruth,” to which the woman only laughed with a poorly-concealed annoyance. 

Rose rolled her shining blue-green eyes and walked from the man, closer to the bow of the magnificent _Titanic._ In truth, her artistic heart burned at the sight of her in all her glory, steam flowing from her smokestacks with pride, so happy to take on passengers she figured she could almost see _Titanic_ beaming. She saw not a ship, not a means of transportation but a work of absolute majesty, hammered and wrought together by the hands of brilliant and skilled and steady men until she was formed, ready to take on distance and anything that was thrown her way. Rose was fascinated by the ocean liner, she wanted to know everything about it; everything down to the tiny iron rivets holding her together, but she pushed this feeling down as women in first class were supposed to push down all feelings, for anything by which Caledon Hockley was impressed was something Rose DeWitt Bukater wished to hate. 

“So this is the ship they say is unsinkable,” Ruth mused, sashaying in the perfect example of an upper-class woman, hands folded daintily within her fur muff.   
“It _is_ unsinkable!” Cal chimed from behind. “God Himself could not sink this ship!”   
Rose turned her hatted head, hearing lowly the bribing of the White Star Line employee by Cal, who shoved a handful of bills in his face in exchange for the workload to be taken off him, spoiled brat that he was, and onto others he deemed more worthy of such duties. She felt bad for the man being forced beyond his job, but she felt no sympathy for Lovejoy, Cal’s right-hand man, his servant and thug and spy, slimy and brash as the man himself, and she secretly rejoiced at the frustration he would endure with their luggage.  
_Oh,_ the small joys in her monotonous life. 

A golden pocket watch was opened in the black-adorned, brutish hands of Cal. “Ladies,” he said, “We’ve got to hurry.”  
They walked through the throng of people, the classes mixing, all perched on the edge of the dock waving to the passengers sixty feet up on the majestic decks of _Titanic,_ and Rose frowned as she was forced to hold onto the crook of her fiancé’s arm as they walked up the ramp. She shivered, feeling as if her gloves were being tainted with eternal grime just by touching him, and she reminded herself that _Titanic_ was not to be lauded and praised. No, it was a slave ship veneered as a luxury, explicitly designed to fool the First-Class airheads of which she was doomed to become, dragging her back to America in chains to resign herself to a life of misery and a loveless marriage to a man who was not afraid to shout at the slightest provocation nor strike her when he so often deemed it necessary. 

They entered, the glamour of the hall ineffective and unimpressive towards her warring mind, and the “Hello, ma’am. Welcome to _Titanic,”_ from the steward at the edge of the ramp seemed to be a sentencing for her execution. She screamed from within, unheard. 

* * *

Their stateroom was the stuff of dreams, embellished in deep rich mahoganies and shining golds, but Rose eschewed the amazement her heart wanted to feel, poisoned by Cal and his entitlement as he handled crystal glasses like children’s toys and spoke to the staff as if they were dirt at the bottom of his shoe. She turned her attention to her art as it was unpacked, already planning on where to hang it in the room, placing it in the air before different walls.  
“Would you like all of them out, miss?” The kindly, timid maid, Trudy, asked her.   
“Yes,” she replied. “We need a little color in this room.”  
_More than the room,_ she thought. She needed color in her life, adventure, change, a challenge to the convention of it all; and yet, doomed to a life with Cal, she was also doomed to a life displayed in perpetual black and white. 

“Put it in there, in the wardrobe,” Lovejoy instructed, dismissively, his shrill voice like knives upon the young girl’s ears. Her blood boiled at the dastardly man stretching his legs into her territory, the only territory she was afforded over Cal’s dominance over just about everything else, and nearly had the mind to make a spectacle, reminding him that he was also staff and had no right to do such a thing before his employer walked back in with a careless and unaffected saunter. 

_"God,”_ he groaned. “Not those finger paintings again. They certainly were a waste of money.”  
She heard the plop of his shoulder to the doorframe and she wept internally for the poor room to feel the weight of such greed and arrogance. If she knew from being forced around the man, she knew it was a weight which was unbearable; clouded and suffocating and dense.   
She smirked slightly, not engaging, staring at another painting. Anger had blossomed to boldness. “The difference between Cal’s taste in art and mine is that I have some.” She placed the canvas carefully to the loveseat, stepping back and admiring it in its strange and unreadable glory. “They’re fascinating, like being inside a dream or something. There’s truth but no logic.”  
“What’s the artist’s name?” Trudy asked, and Rose smiled at the interest, feeling the sense of achievement at Cal’s ignorant opinion being dismissed.   
“Something Picasso.”  
_“‘Something Picasso?’”_ The man scoffed with another sip of champagne, pointing his glass at her. “He won’t amount to a thing. He won’t. Trust me.”  
Rose walked forth, undeterred in her opinions and task, and left him to say to Lovejoy as the only one who would listen, “At least they were cheap.” 

* * *

** _Thursday,_ 11 April 1912 **

By the next morning, the previous evening quiet and slow, they were sailing west off the coast of Ireland after a stop for more passengers in Cherbourg, and thus the voyage was truly underway. The open ocean was like a planet of its own, unending, carrying them as softly as a mother’s arms to their destination. Rose figured she should have felt free and alive, yet she only felt trapped and suffocated, like a cardinal in a cage, knowing on the other side was her fate to which she was so unwillingly condemned. She sat in one of the wicker chairs of the Veranda Café and Palm Court, forced into one of the many formal luncheons she figured she would have to experience every day for the rest of her natural life, and stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows to the aft promenade toward the Atlantic, seeing it only as a pathway that by the second was growing shorter as she moved along it against her will. 

On either side of her were Cal and her mother, the two most commandeering people in her life, like guards who forbid her from entering a secret and mysterious door even though she held the very key in her palm. She was disentitled to her own decisions and her own life in their eyes, and for such the flame of resentment burned brightly in her soul for each of them and their every word was a new match to the wick.   
Also at the table was Margaret Brown, better known to her friends (who included just about everyone who accepted her good company in earnest) as Maggie or Molly, a rotund woman, bright of cheeks and blazing of personality, who took the idea of wealth and the world with which it came as a fine joke.  
Rose instantly loved the woman, with her midwestern accent that felt like a home she never knew and her mocking of the life her riches had brought unto her. Rose’s mother and her peers disliked her; they included her in their social circle for which a fortune was the only undeniable ticket, but they never put their hearts into her membership, as the aristocracy as a whole did not take kindly to the crude and crass _nouveau riche._ She loved Molly Brown all the more just for that.   
There was also J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line. Rose had hardly known him a half-hour and had already deemed him a hubristic and ridiculous man whose personality did not extend beyond _Titanic_ and the achievement of his ownership of her.  
Though, in her mind, she figured ownership belonged in the hands of those that designed her and built her and not who funded her with the flick of the wrist, and the very man who she figured deserved possession of her the most was seated just across from her: Thomas Andrews, chief naval architect of the _RMS Titanic._

He was the man about whom Rose knew the least; besides what she had gathered from their brief introduction the day previous, she knew nothing about him at all. He seemed a kind man; soft-spoken, modest about his achievement of designing and overseeing the construction of the grandest ship on earth, much in contrast with his self-important higher-up. He was a handsome man, no older than forty if she were prevailed upon guess, with dark hair and gentle eyes, and he was Irish, judging by the smooth accent that flowed from his pert pink lips which always seemed to be slightly tilted in a contented smile. She was not surprised to see it, for Rose figured no amount of modesty could save a man from the pure joy only gained when one palpably sat within one’s very own brainchild. 

“She’s the largest moving object ever made by the hand of man in all history. And our master shipbuilder, Mr. Andrews, here, designed her from the keel plates up,” Ismay said, hands comfortably folded at the head of the table.   
“Well, I may have knocked her together but the idea was Mr. Ismay’s,” Mr. Andrews replied, brushing off the ovation like a speck of dust from his shirtsleeve, unimportant. “He envisioned a steamer so grand in scale and so luxurious in its appointments that its supremacy would never be challenged. And _here_ she is,” a double knock upon their table as emphasis, “willed into solid reality.” 

Rose did not want to be impressed. She did not want to show any sort of commendation or awe at Mr. Andrews or _Titanic,_ not when it represented her forever imprisonment. No, she decided just then that she hated both of them, the ship and her god, and she set her jaw like a defiant child.  
She placed her cigarette holder into her mouth, lighting it so for a few precious moments the face of the man before her, handsome and kind and _oh,_ so difficult to hate as she was trying to do was hidden by the dance of the smoke. She felt her mother’s venomous stare right at the nape of her neck.   
Ruth Dewitt Bukater leaned forward ever so slightly, raising her voice so what could so clearly be heard by others could be mistaken as a rudely overheard _tête-à-tête._ She could never spare her daughter a public reprehension, could not resist any temptation of making her out to be a child. “You know I don’t like that, Rose.”   
Her daughter turned to her, lips slightly parted in nonchalant defiance, eyes dull and unfeeling yet lit with a low flame of rebellion, and she blew the smoke straight into her mother’s face.   
“She knows,” Cal butt in, taking the cigarette and mashing it to the table, and Rose mourned her short-lived victory.   
Just then the waiter appeared at her fiancé’s side. “We’ll both have the lamb, rare, with very little mint sauce. You like lamb, don’t you, Sweetpea?”  
She turned and smiled at him, chin raised, eyelashes batting, a look that unmistakably said, _No, I don’t, and you know I don’t, but you don’t care either way, bastard that you are._

“You gonna cut her meat for her, too, there, Cal?” Molly Brown drawled with a laugh and both Rose and Mr. Andrews smiled, though Rose did not notice.   
“Hey, uh, who thought of the name _Titanic?”_ Molly asked, looking from Andrews to Ismay, goofy grin stretching across her playful lips. “Was it you, Bruce?”  
Ismay jumped and squirmed at the chance to laud himself again.   
“Well, yes, actually,” he hummed, poorly feigning the nobility that flowed from Andrews like water. “I wanted to convey sheer size, and size means stability, luxury, and above all, strength.”   
She fumed and was shocked her internalized fire did not set the poor wicker chair on fire beneath her. _He must think we're all right fools, mere planets orbiting his sun, and all because a piece of paper says he owns_ Titanic! _Oh, the pomposity of it! It's just like Cal!_  
“Do you know of Dr. Freud, Mr. Ismay?” Rose was shocked at her ladylike serenity, even in the face of J. Bruce Ismay looking on her from under conceited, hooded eyelids sitting atop a smirking lip as if she were privileged as a mere lady to be speaking to a man of his eminence. “His ideas about the male preoccupation with size might be of particular interest to you.”   
She stole a glance around the table and was thrilled to see the scandalized and embarrassed faces of her mother and husband-to-be, and felt extra proud when she saw Molly nod with her comment as if commending her for speaking their shared thoughts, and the near choking of Thomas Andrews as he struggled not to laugh through his chewing, his enthralled eyes sparkling right upon her.   
_“What’s gotten into you?”_ Ruth disgustedly hissed in her ear, finally affording her a volume at which no one else could hear her grievances against her daughter.   
Her mother was ignored. “Excuse me,” she said, placing her napkin on the table in a final show of ladylikeness, and pushed back and walked towards the sliding doors as the women looked on in varying states of emotion and the men, all except for Cal, stood from their seats in true gentlemanly fashion at a lady leaving the table. She tried not to notice that Mr. Andrews was the only man who fully erected himself, knees straight and hands free from the arms of the chair, while Ismay simply stood halfheartedly, hunched in full preparation of sitting again, his heart hardly in the task. Well, she could not blame him.  
After all, he _had_ just been humiliated by a woman. 

__

“I do apologize,” Ruth stammered, trying to smile, hiding her pallidness behind her glass.   
“She’s a pistol, Cal,” Molly remarked, smiling in satisfaction, amused as could be. “Hope you can handle her!”  
“Well, I may have to start minding what she reads from now on, won’t I, Mrs. Brown?”  
The man’s annoyance and humiliation, possibly more than Ismay’s, could not be hidden, and Thomas Andrews could not deny how much sheer joy that brought him, even at the expense of a man he had not known an hour.   
“Freud, who is he?” Ismay asked, tail tucked between his legs, with a snarl. “I-Is he a passenger?”

* * *

The metaphorical pathway brought Rose no solace, and she wished the engines of _Titanic_ would stop and they may sit and live in the middle of the sprawling ocean until she died, free from a life out of her hands, and then they may set on their merry way, wherever _Titanic’s_ passengers would like to go. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe, listening to the happy hoots and hollers of the steerage passengers just below her, evidence of a joy she had never truly known reaching her ears like a bittersweet birdsong. How she wished she could be one of them, dirt poor, the blemish on the face of society in the eyes of those that seemed to matter, yet happy, joyous, free, in charge of her own life. How she longed for it!  
The very figurehead of her subjection yanked her arm so hard it brought pain to her shoulder, whipping her to face him, to feel the heat of his anger. “What the _hell_ has gotten into you?”  
She tried to drag herself away but he held fast until she heard a seam at the top of her sleeve snap, and she used all of her strength and pulled until she was free, as free as she could be. “Let me _alone,_ Cal.” 

__

Rose walked with no destination in mind, walking and walking until she found a patch of the deck with no people around. She could not bear the sight of other people, knowing that the rest of the world existed when her own was in such turmoil and was about to not be _her_ world at all.   
“Miss DeWitt Bukater!” a voice called to her, getting closer with each syllable. Irish. “Well, that was a right fine joke you told back in there.”   
“Oh, don’t even tease me, Mr. Andrews. I’m in no mood for it,” she snapped, not moving from her position over the rail.   
His ebullience did not falter and to her unjustified, red hot annoyance, his smile remained. “I do not tease you, young Rose. It’s been quite a spell since I’ve heard anyone stun Bruce into silence, if ever I truly have. You are a fiery one, if I may say so.”  
“Oh, so a woman has to be fiery to stand up to a man? I say, Mr. Andrews, you have some nerve!”  
“I-I’m sorry. Forgive me, but I meant it as a compliment. You do not see women display your type of wit in any first-class lounges very often.”  
“No, nor will you, if anyone has anything to say about it.”  
“I’m sorry? What does that—?”  
“Forgive me, but don’t you have somewhere you should be, Mr. Andrews? I’m sure the Master Shipbuilder of _Titanic_ has somewhere better to be than standing here speaking to a woman he doesn’t know.”   
Thomas Andrews was lost for words and stood opening and closing his mouth for a good many seconds before he raised his hat to the lady before him who had not looked at him once.  
“I bid you a good day, Miss DeWitt Bukater.” And with no other words, he walked off, and Rose listened to the clamber of his boots against the wooden deck. 

__

She deflated with only the iron rails holding her up, feeling the weight of regret upon her. How rude she had been to so unsuspecting and undeserving a man, and the man who designed the very ship which was affording her such luxury, no less! Oh, she was no better than Cal! If she had had the energy within her, she would have run after him like a damsel, begging for forgiveness, as she knew it to be the right thing to do. Though even so early in the day she had not, and so she shook her head and begged God to forgive her of her sins. It was all she could do for now and she hoped it was enough.

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There you have it, darlings.  
> Forgive me, I've never had a knack for first chapters and they are not a reflection on the rest! I'm always better once I get started.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and for sticking through the 3,500 words I've just thrown at you! I appreciate it with my whole heart.  
> I shall be with you again shortly, darlings.  
> All my love forever and ever and ever! 
> 
> -m


	2. Of Propellers and Jewels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rose feels more lost than ever and, for once, someone who cares bears witness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am back again!  
> Oh, I just love writing this story!  
> I wrote this chapter without pause from 2am to 7am, and I am simply beat! So please forgive me if it's not 100%!

** _Thursday,_ 11 April 1912 **

Rose DeWitt Bukater stared mindlessly at her untouched course—the third of the night—completely still, ensconced in the mania around her of all the well-to-dos buzzing around her like bees with witless conversation; as maniacal as such could be. She saw her whole life before her as if she had already lived it, an endless parade of parties and cotillions, yachts and polo matches; always the same narrow people, the same mindless chatter. She writhed within at the fact that even at the absence of still, unmoving earth beneath her the routine, the _modus operandi_ continued like an orbiting planet without cessation. Not even the open ocean, the expanse between one land of dull life and the other, could give her respite from what she realized with perpetual horror would be the rest of her days. She felt like she was standing at a great precipice with no one to pull her back, no one who cared or even noticed. 

It was a strange sensation to be sure, acting and moving, speaking and walking without your mind even noticing you’re doing it, and Rose felt strange, indeed, as her feet carried her mindlessly towards the grand doors of the First-Class dining hall.   
She stood, free from the confines, whipped by the cold Atlantic air, feeling positively naked and exposed, able to be seen by anyone and everyone who chose to look her way in a passing glance. Suddenly her eyes exploded with tears and in so very unladylike a fashion—she could almost hear her mother admonishing her in her ear calling her a tomboy, distasteful, undignified—and she ran. She ran as fast as her feet would take her, tripping on some steps with the length of her skirt and the heels of her slippers, falling into ladies and gentlemen walking down the promenade in the night, hearing their cries of scandalization and surprise as she pushed them from her way without a thought. The dull red-orange flame of rebellion just below her soul burned again at shocking these people beyond what they would ever again have to witness.   
What a horror it was; the greatest consternation they would ever have to experience being a woman who on the outside appeared to be a lady conducting herself in a fashion so the opposite. Somehow that thought made Rose sprint faster, like the propellers on the back of the very ship that was her track field, sobbing out her tears and exertion with every few impacts of her feet to the deck, away from something of which she wanted no part but to which she seemed chained like a prisoner. 

* * *

Thomas Andrews had eschewed dinner; he had rebuffed Ismay in what he thought was his subtle swaying, respectfully declined to Mr. Astor, and made his polite excuses to the lot of the First-Class dining party. Though he was no stranger to the ways of the elite as the nephew of a viscount and being the managing director of the drafting department at Harland and Wolff, he had always drifted toward the company of those unburdened by the rules and regulations of the upper classes and infinitely preferred the company of the prosaic, skint men who wielded together the _Titanic_ he created than those who surrounded him like enemy flanks from the attention he received because of it.   
Thus, rather than sit within the stately room of his design—listening to the band playing a florid melody as he engaged in an idle colloquy about who-did-what and who-saw-who and who-went-where-when—he sat on one of the benches at the stern deck—the Third-Class deck—watching the stars glimmer above him and listening to the ocean skirmishing with the hull of his ship as he jotted down notes in his prized notebook about what improvements he would see made to his beloved _Titanic_ before her next voyage.   
It was a peace he knew like none another, simply a man among the elements, nestled in the kindly embrace of nature, experiencing natural life as his compeers in First-Class would never know. His heart ached; he knew if they could simply see beyond the things of which they were simply handed or they so easily procured, see the life away from the material that lay waving enticingly just ahead, they could know true harmony, one beyond the false and easily squandered satisfaction that came from wealth.  
Then, perhaps, the three classes need not be so divided and they could share in the mutual majestic affordances of life.   
Then, just perhaps, he could build a ship without separate classes where all could mingle as the singular species they were, unseparated.   
_Oh,_ how he dreamed of it. But he was no fool; he knew such a way of living, if ever in humankind’s future, was so far away no form of transportation could reach it. Not even _Titanic._

So distracted was he by his philosophical and fantastical musings, writing unconsciously about the paint on the bulkheads already chipping, he almost did not notice the woman flying past him so fast he shivered at the rush of air she brought in her wake. He heard her struggling for air, lungs heaving, hair flying from its chignon at the back of her head, sobs ripping from her throat with such savagery he nearly winced. She disappeared from view within mere seconds, having run so far and from something so quickly, that he stood and followed her to the very end of the stern, the only place she could go.   
His notebook and fountain pen, trustier friend than any mortal he had ever known, lay unattended on the bench beside where he sat for the first-ever time. 

Mr. Andrews looked over his shoulder. No one, of course; the crew and First and Second-Class passengers were at dinner, steerage probably four or five drinks and dances into their evening of true jubilation. Alone, he loped towards the fantail, unaware of just what he planned to do. Hold the lady while she wept? No, that would never do. Drag her by the hair back to whomever she was running from? Certainly not, that was hardly his place nor his duty. 

Whatever he could have thought of doing, nothing could have prepared him for the pure, searing, abject horror of seeing the burgundy bedecked woman climbed over the gunwale of his beloved ship, leaning outwards towards the endless expanse of black, freezing ocean sixty feet below. His eyes widened, his blood running nearly as cold as the sea towards which her eyes were downcast and to which her mind was resigned. For once in his life, the logical and mechanical Thomas Andrews had not the foggiest idea what to do. 

He could hear her shivering, both from the cold and the exertion and the heartache of whatever was affecting her so, he could see her trembling beneath the measly protection of her evening gown, saw when she turned her head just so the tears glinting upon her milky white cheeks in the starlight above her and the ship’s lights just behind her.   
With one foot in front of the other, he walked forward. He could not tell if he were so stealthy or she simply so tormented that she did not hear what was so close behind her, but she did not notice him and kept her eyes only on the water, struggling between the thought of a harrowing death or what was evidently an even more harrowing life. His heart clenched. 

“Miss, don’t do it, please,” he called, hand out in front of him, wanting so terribly to simply grab her and yank her to safety.   
The soft red curls, tinged an orangey-brown in the night, whipped around on a startled head as she looked on the man disturbing her.   
Mr. Andrews felt at once all the strength in every one of his limbs escape him like a rush of air and he felt as if all the blood drained from his heart, depriving him of his life source.   
_Rose._  
It was Rose, witty and intelligent Rose DeWitt Bukater, hanging off the stern of his beloved _Titanic._

“Rose…” he whispered in dismay, so quiet under the rushing of the ship’s propellers that he was sure she did not hear him.   
“Stay back! Don’t come any closer!” She exclaimed, like a frightened feral animal.   
“Young Rose, give me your hand. Let me pull you back over,” he said, reaching carefully for her.   
“Mr. Andrews.” That young plagued face sobered in realization. “No! Stay where you are! I mean it. I’ll let go!”   
_No, you won’t,_ he wanted to say. _If you were truly so resigned, you would have let go by now._

“You don’t want to do this,” he said instead.   
When she looked on him again, her eyes burned nearly as bright as the hair atop her head. “What do you mean I don’t? Do not presume to tell me what I do and do not want! You don’t _know_ me! You don’t know a single thing _about_ me!”   
“No, I don’t, Young Rose. But I should like to see you live long enough so that I may learn a thing about you.”   
“Don’t say such things to me, Mr. Andrews. You don’t care one fig about me, no one does! You’re just like the rest of them. You only care that should I die your name will be attached. I’m nothing but a stricture to the reputation of the Master Shipbuilder. Go away, you’re distracting me!” 

He could have wept if it had been appropriate for a gentleman to weep in front of a lady, or if he had been a more selfish man. If it were not her words, her voice, the emptiness to her tone of speaking told him just how alone she felt. Should she be floating dead in the ocean it would make no difference, for she felt as if she were freezing in an expanse just as large without death, without a single person on which to cling or rely. 

“You’re wrong, Rose. I do care about you and I could not possibly give less thought to my reputation at this moment than I already am. I may not know you well nor have I known you for long, but I care, I assure you I do. I care enough that I should like to be your friend, and I care enough that I want to know what has brought you to such a state that you feel jumping off the back of _Titanic_ is the only solution.”   
The turn of her head was slow now, thinking, pondering, realizing. The shivering ceased, hot adrenaline coursing through her, yet the trembling remained and was steadfast as fresh tears coursed down her pale cheeks. She did not look away from him, not for a second, as if baring into his very soul to see if he were in earnest.   
Mr. Andrews stepped forward again, noticing her flinch as he did so, but continued towards her until he could hear the snivels with her every breath and the quiet clinking of the stones on her gown gently kissing the rails as they whipped in the wind.   
_“Please,_ Rose,” he implored, reaching again. “Give me your hand.” 

And she did. Next to stepping on _Titanic,_ his lifeblood and creation, and holding his newborn daughter in his arms for the first time, feeling the pained Rose DeWitt Bukater’s cold and damp hand in his palm was the greatest sensation he had ever felt, and all too suddenly he was assaulted with the utmost need to ensure that she never felt the desire to take such drastic risks of measure ever again. 

Unable to help it, Thomas Andrews chuckled, looking to their clasped hands when she turned to face him, the adrift intertwined with her rescuer. Through her tortured tears, Rose did the same as the wind whipped between them, two barriers forged into one.   
“There you are, Young Rose,” he whispered with a smile, like their own little shared secret witnessed by no one but the sea. “Now, step up. Careful.” 

She lifted one ruby red-heeled foot to the first rail. As she stepped, shifting her weight to her toes, the black netting of her frock twisted around her heel and she slipped and fell, the only thing keeping her from the death she so recently craved being the Master Shipbuilder’s hands clasped around her milky arm.   
“Oh, _God!_ Help me! Help me, _please!”_ The words ripped from her lungs as her legs swayed as effortlessly as the cloth of the Union Jack right beside them; unimportant, weak, the first of her that would meet her watery death.   
“I’ve got you! _I’ve got you,_ Rose! I won’t let go.”   
Her frightened breaths were knives on his ears. He felt her relax slightly, encouraged by his most wholehearted promise. She put her foot again to the deck with a grunt, lifting herself before she slipped again, lower this time, her forearms hanging below _Titanic’s_ name plastered in big white letters across her stern, nearly pulling him over with her.   
“Mr. Andrews! Please! _Help!”_

By then he could hear the clamoring of whatever White Star Line crewmen were nearby and heard her distress. He could not bring himself to care just then what conclusions they would reach on their own volition and only cared about the girl slipping from his grip.   
He braced himself with one boot against the rails and pulled. At last, the dress freed itself from beneath her shoes and she stood on the lower rails with firm feet. His arms wound themselves around her waist, heaving her over as she gripped onto his shoulders like a lifeline. They fell to the deck, gasping and panting as she held him in her arms like she had never held anyone and never thought she would hold anyone ever again. 

The slam of boots vibrated beneath them as Quartermaster Rowe and a couple of seamen surrounded them, and only then did Mr. Andrews unhand her and roll back on his knees away from the trembling girl on her back, struggling for breath, the hem of her dress around the tops of her thighs and her stockings ripped, showing to the world patches of milky skin always hidden away from the eyes of men. 

“Oh, _shit…”_ He heard Rowe spit under his breath in the whistling wind. “Mr. Andrews, step away from the lady.”   
His legs shook as he erected himself despite noticing the pleading in Rose’s eyes not to leave her bereft and alone, and he backed slowly towards the rails over which he had just pulled her to safety and life anew, hands raised in a half surrender.   
“Come now, Quartermaster. Let us be reasonable. Do you truly think I’d slave over _Titanic’s_ design and construction for five years and attach my name to her just to assault a lady on her decks?”   
“Perhaps not, sir, but I cannot deny what I see. I shall have to get her family and the master-at-arms.”   
He nodded. “Do what you must. Just get her to safety.” 

* * *

Time passed thusly in a blur, as Rose's near-death and his witnessing of it caught up to him. He barely acknowledged the rushing of the master-at-arms, Mr. Hockley, his manservant, and another man he recognized as Colonel Archibald Gracie to the scene. He stared at his shoes, opening and closing his mouth, trying desperately and in vain to make sense of all that occurred while they talked around him, Hockley becoming increasingly infuriated at what he assumed was his fiancée’s near-rape at the hands of the architect of the _RMS Titanic._ He did not notice Rose being wrapped in a blanket, pale and shivering, nor the master-at-arms and Rowe looking positively bewildered and betrayed at his supposed conduct, nor did he hear the girl’s fiancé’s blustering until he was right before him, in his face, grabbing his lapels. 

“I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done or what you’ve built. What made you think you could put your hands on my fiancée? What did you think you were doing, you filth?”   
“Cal, stop!” Rose finally intervened, standing and shoving him from Mr. Andrews with a weak blanketed shoulder, looking up at her rescuer with all the repentance she could muster. “It was an accident!”   
The man, dressed comically in his black-tie evening dress, scoffed. “An _accident?”_  
“It _was!”_ She cried indignantly before relaxing into a charming and demure smile with a tiny giggle. “Stupid, really. I was leaning over and I slipped! I was leaning far over to see the, uh...ah, the ah...” She closed her eyes in pensive thought, twirling her finger in a circle in animation, and, had he not been under the threat of arrest on his _own damned vessel,_ Mr. Andrews would have laughed aloud.   
“P-Propellers?” Cal impatiently spat.   
“Propellers! And I slipped! And I would have gone overboard, but Mr. Andrews, here, saved me and almost went over himself!”  
He could not help but smirk. _Oh, you clever girl. How easily you lie. What more about Rose DeWitt Bukater am I to learn before the night is out?_

“The propellers. She wanted to see the propellers!” Hockley beamed in sarcastic relief, displaying his arms as if showing with good grace everyone what a fool he was to marry.   
“Like I said, women and machinery do not mix,” Gracie chimed in, receiving the unnoticed glares of both Rose and Mr. Andrews and the subtle agreeing nod from Hockley.   
“Was that the way of it, sir?” The master-at-arms turned to him, a certain fear in his eyes, and Mr. Andrews wondered how he would be manhandled or shoved or kicked around had he been a steerage passenger instead of the top tier of _Titanic’s_ very own brand of royalty. He could not even bear the thought.   
His gaze strayed to Rose, standing upright with the thin cloth draped across her shoulders, a renewed vigor in the face of her believed lie, brave in the face of interrogation after weakness, and she begged him with her alight blue-green eyes to go along with her absurd story. _Please don’t tell them that you rescued me from killing myself on your ship,_ they seemed to say. _Please allow me this._  
“Yes. Yes, that was how it was,” he said to no one in particular, feeling no need to have to answer to this lot of utter fools, not on _his_ liner.   
“Well, Mr. Andrews, here, is a hero, then! Good for you, sir! Well done!” Gracie exclaimed, throwing up his hands. “So it’s all’s well and back to our brandy, eh?” 

It was as if he had vanished into thin air with the master-at-arms shuffling awkwardly away, Gracie, fool that he was, turning with his mind only on going back to the comfort of his own selfish little world and Hockley, taking Rose and rubbing her arms vigorously with his hands and leading her away with a veneered, “Look at you, you must be freezing! Let’s get you inside.”   
As they walked, he no longer important, Rose sagged against Hockley in defeat, Gracie stopped him and with a clearing of his throat and a jerk of his head towards Mr. Andrews said, “Perhaps a little something for her rescuer?”  
“Of course!” replied Hockley, turning to his manservant. “Uh, Mr. Lovejoy, I think a twenty should do it.”   
Rose sputtered and scoffed, still ever the lady. “Is _that_ the going rate for saving the woman you love? Besides, I’m sure Mr. Andrews hardly needs your money.”  
Her fiancé squinted, the lightest of condescending smirks planted on his lip, and peaceable Mr. Andrews felt that if no one else had been present he could have wrung his neck. “Rose is displeased. Mmm, what to do?” 

Hockley sauntered towards him and he tensed, feeling the congestive air just by being presented with the man. He could hardly believe that Rose could still breathe with the sheer prevalence at which she was forced to stand next to him, touch him, or, dare he imagine, kissing him and beyond.   
“Perhaps you could join us for dinner tomorrow evening, to regale our group with your heroic tale, Mr. Andrews?” He spoke, the picture of false chivalry, a man with a handsome face guarding the blackest and most rotten of souls that festered and oozed forth, unseen by those around him except by those who cared in earnest to see people in their real form. And, if prevailed upon to surmise, Mr. Andrews would assume that of this group standing before him, of all of First-Class, he and Rose were the only ones who cared about such things.   
“Why, I’d be honored. Yes, I shall be there,” he smiled but he was sure it appeared as only a grimace, eyes never leaving the fiery headed girl.   
“Good. Settled then.”  
Towards their cabins again they walked, and with one last look from Rose, both thankfulness and sorrow blended into one beautiful glint of her eyes, she turned, lead away by Hockley into the night. 

* * *

Warmth as Rose never knew swaddled her, dressed in her nightgown and dressing gown as she plopped before her vanity, polishing her mirror and brushing her hair in a sweet silence only interrupted by her beloved music box. The door just behind her opened slowly, ominously, basking Cal in the light by every miserable inch revealed and reflected in her mirror. She frowned.   
“I know you’ve been melancholy,” his voice was far too tender for a man of his character and Rose was on her guard in an instant, straightening her back with a corset of sheer suspicion. “I don’t pretend to know why.”  
“I intended to save this until the engagement gala next week,” he shoved the top of her music box down, cutting off the melody like a knife to a rope and shoved it away like a useless child’s toy, “but I thought tonight…”  
Diamonds glinted in the yellow light of her chamber so brightly her eyes rapidly blinked to adjust. Within the black velvet box held in his hands was a necklace, charm of royal blue so big she figured she could not close her entire small hand round it, diamonds never-ending, winding around the half-circle of the chain.   
“Good gracious!” She gasped.   
“...Perhaps as a reminder of my feelings for you.”  
“Is it a—”  
“Diamond? Yes,” he laughed, biting his lip, jumping up from his seat upon her mahogany vanity, shaking the mirror as he draped the cold stone chain around her neck and stared at her in the reflection as if she were a purebred hound with a new collar as opposed to his bride-to-be. 

“It was worn by Louis the Sixteenth, and they called it _Le Coeur de la Mer._ The—”  
“Heart of the Ocean,” she finished for him.  
Rose fingered the lavalier sitting heavily on her breast for some moments in a state of motionless shock, stunned by the beauty of it and confused beyond sense by his reasoning for giving it to her. She was snapped from her reverie with a shake of the head by his preying eyes upon her in the mirror. 

“It’s overwhelming,” was all she could manage.   
“Well, it’s for royalty,” he smirked. “And we _are_ royalty, Rose.” 

She looked to him, thinking behind her eyes thoughts which his superficial ones could not see, wondering how he figured their being royalty of any sort was something to be lauded.  
In any case, had they truly been royal, she figured it would not have been long until Cal was beneath the blade of the guillotine, betrayed by his people in the face of all his cruelties, and it was positively worrisome to Rose how easily that image came to her mind. 

She felt the floor shake as he kneeled beside her chair, laying his face on the heel of his hand, observing her like a painting as he said, “You know, there’s nothing I couldn’t give you. There’s nothing I’d deny you if you would not deny me.”  
For the first time, they looked on one another with their own eyes, him staring up to her, face expectant as he coyly rubbed the back of his neck like the shy schoolboy she knew he had never been.   
She could have laughed. How easy he made it sound! How one-sided he made what was supposed to be love between a man and a woman seem; that she should give all that truly mattered and he should give all that did not but that he thought should matter the most. _Oh,_ she could have laughed! 

“Oh, open your heart to me, Rose,” she was shoved slightly by his shoulder as if she were one of his boyhood friends being dared to jump off a high cliff into a lake.  
She said nothing and turned back to her reflection, begging her eyes to erase him from her view. The pendant was cold and lifeless in her fingers as she turned it gently this way and that as it glinted and sparkled whenever it caught a beam of light. It was the pinnacle and peak of the only love she would ever receive from Cal and was the quintessence of the collective hopes and desires of her peers: material possessions. Jewelry, automobiles, furniture, art; that was all that mattered to the First-Class. Love did not exist, and if it did, it did not matter, it was not important, it had no bearing in the making of decisions that could change the course of one’s life nor did it prove to have any credit in the abridgment of one’s happiness.  
How could she accept that, how could she accept _this,_ when the heart thudding with life in her breast just beneath the weight of the royal blue diamond which had pounded as she leaned over the ship in what she thought would be its last beats, thrummed with unclaimed love to be given with every pump?

_Open your heart to me, Rose._

She wanted to. _Oh,_ she wanted to. She wanted to love him and not care about the dreary life that was laid out in front of her, bereft of adventure or surprise or deviation. She wanted to be thankful for her situation when so many others had not a fraction of what she did, were not afforded what she was. She wanted to marry Cal with no objections or opposition, to be none the wiser about to just what she was condemning herself, to make her mother happy and not be quarrelsome for, as fickle as Ruth DeWitt Bukater was, her daughter had never wanted anything more than her approval and her satisfaction at her own hand.   
But she couldn’t; she just _couldn’t!_ Not when Cal was as cruel and quick to anger as he was, not when she _was_ wise and could see how drab her destiny was when her heart yearned for so much more and she knew she would shed every monetary possession she owned and give it to those who truly wanted and needed them if she could just be free of it all.   
And most of all, she could not love Cal nor truly and graciously resign herself to the life he would provide when she could not be sure that, had it been he that had been there when she was hanging desperately onto the back of _Titanic_ and onto what could have been the last seconds of her life, he would have coaxed her over the side, nor did she know if he would have wanted to at all.   
Not like the kindly Irish gentleman shipbuilder whom she had so heartlessly misjudged. Not like he, who spoke to her as if there was no one dearer to him than she was, who appreciated her wit and acknowledged her grievances as if they were the most justified argument he had ever heard, who took her as she crumpled over onto the deck in his arms, and who held her in her anguish like she was the most precious creature ever to grace his eyes and ever to walk God’s green Earth. 

And so, the charm resting on her chest remained cold and unloved just as she was, fondled halfheartedly by her marveling fingers as she saw it just as it was: a material possession whose sole purpose was to sway her small mind to submission, bereft of a circumstance of affection and romance as she so often saw so many things.   
And as Rose sat there, lost in her own world of a more ideal life just beyond her reach, she simply could not help but wonder how different things would be had she, Rose DeWitt Bukater, instead of Caledon Hockley, met Mr. Thomas Andrews of Harland and Wolff, naval architect of the _RMS Titanic_ in England and wore his ring on her finger and his jewel around her neck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it, darlings.  
> I don't expect this story to be immensely popular as Jack and Rose (understandably, of course!) dominates the whole of the Titanic community, but I hope the few who notice this ship appreciate this story, truly I do!  
> I shall be back with you again in a moment, dears. 
> 
> I love you all! 
> 
> -m <3


	3. Of Strolls and Realizations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rose seeks out Mr. Andrews, and Mrs. Molly Brown makes Mr. Andrews see truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And I am back, with 6,000 words and 12 pages worth of chapter for you!  
> I truly hope you enjoy it because I really did put my heart into this for all of you :)  
> Thank you for 40+ hits and your kudos and comments.  
> Truly, comments make this all worth it and make me smile like a fool.  
> I love you all, and thank you for sticking around and making it here with me this far! <3

** _Friday,_ 12 April 1912 **

Madeleine Astor was, in Rose’s opinion, a flighty, silly girl despite the entire year of life she had on her. She figured her pregnancy—which was the most open secret in all of respectable society that she couldn’t fathom why they even pretended by now—only increased such attributes in her until she almost felt that the older girl was a little sister whom Rose had to protect from making a fool of herself.   
However, in Madeleine, Rose found (which she could hardly find in anyone else for fear that word would escape loose lips and rumors would spread) a confidante more trustworthy than a personality such as hers would suggest. She knew the burdens of scandal; the glowers of the elite poorly hidden behind garnished glasses, the pleasantries more insincere than the jewels on her mother’s brooches and rings, the way they would stand just the perfect distance away to be considered rude, as if one had the plague and they did not want to catch it.  
And though the faults she could find in First-Class ways of life were innumerable, one useful thing was that with their inclination towards gossip and their insular little world where everybody knew everybody, wanting to know about a person—where they come from, were they respectable, how much money do they have, what muds of scandal have stained their name—was as simple a question answered as any. And because of this, the bruises of a hardly settled scandal on her back as well as her new marriage to one of the wealthiest and most prominent men in the world, Rose could ask Madeleine Astor any questions, nevermind how inappropriate nor improper, about any person with no chances of even a single syllable leaving the four walls of the room in which they sat, curled together like a pair of scheming thieves. 

After listening to Madeleine’s prattle about high society affairs with a lilted voice and fits of laughter that would have suggested to anyone else that she was of unsound mind—as she supposed was her due for encouraging her to speak indecorously when she was trying so hard to fit in with the decorous—she sat her down and asked for her, with as grave a face as she could muster, to tell her everything she knew about Thomas Andrews.

As could be expected from the girl, Rose received far more than she bargained for; vague details of his family, especially his uncle, some Viscount who was chairman of the shipyard where _Titanic_ was built, his apprenticeship there, his design of the Olympic-class liners, the most luxurious ships in the world, his unusual kindness to the lower classes that made him most famous and concurrently the subject of much suspicion from his peers. Even Madeleine, whose intelligence Rose reckoned went nowhere beyond the books shoved in her hands at finishing school, was able to acknowledge the sheer genius and gentility that seemed to possess the man. 

Happy she would have been with just that, as it was more information than she ever expected until she was summoned to Madeleine’s suite in the dead of night only to be met with the girl, devilish smirk only exacerbated by the glow of her delicate condition, a large scroll of paper tucked underneath her arm. And even as excited by adventure and contumacy as she was, Rose was horrified to discover that Madeleine Astor had snuck into Mr. Andrews’s quarters and stolen one of his blueprints of _Titanic,_ a hand-sketched likeness of her from the port side, every cabin and deck drawn in perfect symmetry and lifelikeness.   
She gasped, her anger at her friend melting away into amazement. Besides the world-renowned artists whose paintings she admired in galleries and art shows, this was the most artistically ingenious drawing she had ever seen.  
Rather than a simple skeleton of the ship, rather than drawing her to be as inanimate as she was, Mr. Andrews had given her depth, shading; drew smoke flowing from her smokestacks and foam in the undrawn sea surrounding her propellers. He had drawn her as a man would draw a most beloved woman and within an instant, from this and the remembrance of how his eyes sparkled when he spoke of her, she knew that he loved _Titanic_ as he would his very own child. But she was a child of his very own design, changed and improved as he saw fit, and just as much of himself rested in her bulkheads and rivets as would be in his own human son or daughter with his very blood running through their veins, if not more.  
It was a depth of feeling she had never seen in any of her upper-class compatriots, as the show of emotions was considered weak and attributed only to those without a grasp on them, and all of a sudden, viewing this drawing—as horrid as it was of her to give any sort of encouragement to Madeleine for stealing it, who stood over her, mischievous lip between her teeth—was like the breath of air she had been longing for ever since she could remember. 

And thus, after bidding goodnight to Madeleine with a sharp reproach which she knew well enough that she hardly took seriously, Rose decided to seek out Mr. Andrews in the morning. 

* * *

Dawn upon the open ocean, especially when the sun was just peeking over the horizon, was one of the most beautiful things she had ever witnessed. It was times such as these that she wished she still had her canvases and watercolors with her. She had left them behind in England after Cal told her she could either keep her own supplies or get the Picasso and Monet paintings of which she had so often dreamed. Somewhere she figured he would have snatched her materials away from her somehow anyway if she had chosen to be defiant, and so she conceded. It was the first of many diktats which resulted in her losing a part of herself like a single chip off a China teacup until she was nothing but a pile of rubble that once made up something beautiful but was useless in its tatters. 

The gold satin of her day dress gleamed in the early morning sun and she could not help but admire it, taking in every precious second of her brightly colored frocks before she reached America and was reduced to matronly wear of dull navy blues and purples and blacks, lace collars high and tight and bothersome on her throat.  
She could bear the idea if she had been painfully, deliriously in love with Cal, dizzyingly happy at the prospect of marrying him, for what one wears was, in her opinion, a small price to pay for true love. But their love was not true if it was to be called love at all, and she was painfully, deliriously, dizzyingly sickened at the prospect of marrying him, and worse still she had not a say in the matter. 

_No,_ she thought. It was far too early in the morning for it to be tainted by thoughts she could entertain once they reached New York and for the rest of her life. Just now, she had a mission, and it was to find the man who had saved her just the night before.   
And it was as if the world were showing her a drop of kindness, giving unto her just one thing she wanted, for there Thomas Andrews was, walking towards her with his notebook in hand as always and his pen scratching fast against paper, hardly looking where he was going. Rose nearly figured she had better not disturb him, as engrossed in his work as he seemed, as well as the fear that she would not be able to speak as she wanted. Knowing all that she did about him now, she discovered he made her rather nervous. 

“Mr. Andrews!” She cried, grabbing onto his coat sleeve as he sauntered just next to her.   
Already she was off to a poor and improper start.   
“Rose! Good morning!” He replied, smiling, placing his pen back in his breast pocket.   
She figured she must feel grateful for that, knowing how precious his work was to him.   
“Good morning to you, too.”  
“What are you doing about so early in the morning?”  
“Well, I...I just, I...that is…” _You fool!_ “I was actually hoping to find you.”  
A look of astonishment passed over his handsome face, translated into a raise of the brow and a tick in his jaw. It quickly melted into a smile and he snapped his book shut, tucking it safely under a jacketed arm and gestured his hand before him, inviting her to walk.   
“Me? And what could you have to talk to me about, Young Rose?”  
He was fooling with her, she knew. He knew just as well as she did that after he rescued her from making quite literally the most unchangeable decision possible, she had plenty she could want to say to him, and even more that she _should_ say to him for the sake of propriety, but she could not bear to bring up such a subject, not yet. She hoped he would allow her that. 

“Well, I...I must admit I spoke to a friend last night and she...she seemed to know much about you, and I…” the flush upon her cheeks burned so horribly it robbed her of speech.   
He chuckled. “And? Did you discover anything of value? Nothing too terrible, I hope!”  
Rose supposed it was better to fib than admit that her friend had stolen from him at her own inadvertent prompting.   
She gasped. “Oh, no, Mr. Andrews! Nothing terrible at all! Simply how you began at Harland and Wolff and your designing _Titanic._ I also heard that you…” Oh, how did she phrase this? God help her. She never had been a good liar, after all, if her excuse to Cal last night was any example. “I heard that you were an artist of sorts.”  
“Well, I’m afraid I must disappoint you on that front, Young Rose. I’m no artist.”  
“I don’t believe you! I had quite a reliable source and I’m very inclined to believe them! Besides, you’ve already demonstrated yourself to be a very modest man!”   
He chuckled, looking to his notebook, stroking the leather with an affectionate thumb, seemingly thinking. “Well, I sketch from time to time. I draw _Titanic_ often, sometimes for architectural purposes but more often simply because she is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and I can't help myself.”  
A genuine, fond smile stretched on her plump pink lips. “And I assume these drawings of yours are in your notebook?”  
He smiled back, lowering his head as if he were shy. 

_What a wonder!_ she exclaimed to herself. _The Master Shipbuilder, the genius of White Star Line as they’d never known one before, the man whose very hands and brain forged the_ RMS Titanic, _and I, Rose DeWitt Bukater, have made him blush!_

“They are,” he said with an affirming nod.   
“May I…” she reached forward before drawing back again, unsure. “May I see?”   
Mr. Andrews’s head snapped up, eyes wide, trying desperately not to betray his shock. He stammered for a moment and Rose grew embarrassed at her forwardness. “O-Of course you may, I just...forgive me, I have never—”  
“I hope I have not offended you—”  
“No!” He exclaimed, perhaps a bit too quickly and vehemently. “No, you haven’t. You couldn’t. I just...I’ve never had anyone interested in my work.”  
Rose smiled and her heart leaped, hearing in his voice the exact sensation of understanding she felt when she was around him, and gratefully accepted his extended notebook.  
The privilege of being trusted with handling it was certainly not lost on her. 

They made their way over to two lounge chairs, sitting facing one another as the deck began to fill with the lot of First-Class having begun to wake and take their morning turns about before breakfast. 

The first page he had turned to showed a drawing of _Titanic,_ similar to the one she had seen provided by Mrs. Astor, albeit smaller and less detailed, and yet even still she marveled at it.   
A turn of the page revealed another drawing of his beloved ship, only not in an architectural light; Mr. Andrews had drawn her sailing off into the sea, steam blowing back, lights gleaming on the water, people leaning over the railings and watching the scenery of sunset drawn lightly on the horizon which was so detailed the lack of color was insubstantial. Rose spied the date at the bottom just below his elegant, slanted signature: **30 March 1912.**  
He had drawn this before she had set sail—before she had even had her sea trials!—and from an image summoned by his mind rather than observed by his eyes. Somehow this drawing, poetic and lyrical, was far more impressive to her than the one Madeleine had shown her of _Titanic_ and her inner minutiae broken down and divided like the organs and systems of a human body, for his heart had forged this one and his brain the other. And yet, on both fronts, the man’s talents seemed so boundless she could hardly believe he was real, and more so, that he was before her.   
She stole a look at him, sat in front of her with nothing to do but wait for her reactions whether they be encouragements or criticisms, wringing his fingers in his black leather gloves like a nervous boy, hiding his eyes under the brim of his hat.   
How refreshing it was to be in the presence of a man whose every breath was not laced with a rotten form of confidence and venomous self-centeredness, who valued her opinion enough to be nervous about it. She worried for a brief moment he would be able to hear the thudding of her heart in her chest. _Thrumming with unclaimed love…_

The next was a drawing of a lady, pristinely dressed, draped in a fur shawl and a flowered hat. She was holding a smiling baby, her cheeks dark and alight with wisps of dark hair atop her young head. Her soul swelled.   
“Oh, what a beautiful baby!” She exclaimed, taking an extra moment to admire.   
Mr. Andrews clenched his fingers on the lip of the white chair, dreading the questions that did not come. _Who is this? Whose baby is it? Are they family of yours?_  
And yet, she was silent, and he breathed freely. It was a conversation that, just as his rescuing her last night was for her, was not a conversation he was yet prepared to have. _Let me go on just a bit longer,_ he begged to no one in particular. 

* * *

Never would Rose have believed that within the confines of those leather-bound pages of thick rich bookfell she would find a sketch of a lady, naked, splayed out against a wall, surrounded by statues and trinkets which reminded her of the opera houses of Paris, hidden in plain sight in the middle of the book between austere notes of self-criticism regarding _Titanic_ on one side and innocent artwork on the other. 

“Oh... _Oh, my…”_ she was lost for words, briefly glancing up when a man and woman walking past blocked her light, perfectly respectable, unaware of just what she was witnessing, and she brought the book closer to herself to avoid any unwanted stares at his private work. “This is…”  
Rose trailed off as her eyes wandered to his signature, more hectic and untamed than in the last one, and the date startled her.  
**3 August 1888.**  
She had not even been a thought in her mother’s head, nor a twinkle in her father’s eye; in fact, her parents had not even met each other yet! Suddenly she felt like a child again, as if her adulthood, however premature it had been, was all a dream and she was once more insensible of the ways of adults, trying to appear _au fait _with juvenile foolhardiness.__

____

The poor thing was so embarrassed he was redder than the dress she had worn the night before. “I-I had forgotten about that one. Forgive me, I—”   
“No, no! It’s exquisite work, I-I just wasn’t expecting to see—” She could not seem to get the words _a nude lady_ or _a lady’s breasts_ out of her mouth.   
“I was...only a lad when I drew that. She...She was my first love, you could say. Niamh, her name was,” he stuttered, no less red, and for a moment she worried he might faint.   
“She was...very beautiful,” she refused to name the twinge in her chest as jealousy. She would not ruin this with such a thing. She gazed at the diamond on her finger to try and quell her unwanted emotions. “May I ask what happened to her?”  
“She…She died quite young. Measles, if I remember correctly,” his eyes turned melancholy and dark.   
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Andrews. I shouldn’t have asked. It was quite rude of me—”  
“No, Young Rose. If anyone were to know, I would want it to be you.”   
She smiled and placed a warm hand on his arm and he tried to ignore how it burned just there even after they got up and began strolling across the length of the ship. 

____

They walked until the sun was fully over the barrier of the horizon and the day had set in. The bugle for breakfast was ignored and they used the excuse of not being hungry and said that they would certainly be by luncheon. But if they were to be true to themselves, they would acknowledge that they simply did not want to leave each another’s company and, if it had been socially acceptable, would have missed the last two remaining meals of the day to remain with one another. 

____

Their childhoods were discussed in such detail the other could perfectly see the images in their head; Mr. Andrews’s in County Down, rambunctious with his brothers and free of spirit and Rose’s in Philadelphia, confined to First-Class rules, constrained but happy. She told him of her father and what she remembered of him before he died, something she had not even talked with Cal about, deeming him too unfeeling to understand the absence in her heart. Mr. Andrews did, and though a pat on the hand was all she received as comfort when tears pricked her eyes, she could feel within his touch everything he wished he could do if they were not being watched at every angle by unknowing spies.   
He talked of building the _Titanic,_ the harrowing task of years of design and overseeing construction, and he commended the workers who built her as if they were his superiors rather than it being the other way around. He did not miss the brightening of her eyes as he talked of his ship, the pure fascination that bedecked her features as he spoke of details that bored even the most mechanical of men. She smiled when he told her of the new davits and asked questions about the watertight compartments— _"What a feat!"_ —and fumed within her eyes when he told her how he had been overruled in the compartments extending to the B Deck and, in response, spoke Mr. Ismay’s name with an expletive he had not heard since he had been surrounded by the most uncouth Irish men back home. 

If there was a God as he truly believed there was, he thanked Him for giving him her company, even if they should part after the journey and never meet again. Their time afforded was enough, for in just an hour, walking _Titanic_ with her, Rose DeWitt Bukater had restored much of his faith in his fellow man and he marveled at her power over his judgments and his heart, though he would not have admitted the latter if it meant his death. 

* * *

Hours had passed and the luncheon bugle was played on unhearing ears. They had lost count on how many times they had walked the length of the ship after ten and, by then, their own respective early lives were understood by the other in their entireties, like the first pieces of a puzzle longing for full completion. She ceased walking and he turned to her, contented smile on his face and mirth in his eyes. 

____

“You know, when we were first boarding _Titanic,_ I was exceptionally rude about her. I saw that Cal liked her so terribly and I just wanted to hate her for it and you because you built her. It was wrong of me. I hope you, and she, can forgive me,” she stroked a soft, slow hand along her rail, an apologetic, loving caress, and he was sure he could have died right there. “I even said she didn’t look any bigger or grander than the _Mauretania._ And yet she is.”  
“Aye? There is no doubt that she is bigger, but you think she is grander?” He smiled with pride, looking affectionately at his beloved ship.  
“Oh, yes! She is a work of art, Mr. Andrews. I know most people would just see a ship, a modus of transportation, a means to an end. But she’s so much more than that. She’s...She’s the hard, tireless work of so many people put together, she’s a miracle of men. She’s what none of us could ever dream of and yet here she is!”  
Her eyes were alight and she spoke as if reciting poetry, delicate and lilted and so full of emotion had it been palpable he probably would have been suffocated in it. And if they had not both been spoken for, for better or worse, and simply for the sake of her own reputation and that of his daughter and not for his, he would have kissed her right there, damn whoever may have been watching. Never in his life had he met someone who, in earnest, saw his _Titanic_ as he did. And yet there she stood, professing her love for his ship, and, by _God,_ he wanted to kiss her for it.  
He wanted to know what it was like to kiss a lady who seemed to be made for him. 

____

He turned from her; he had to, for if he looked at her passionate and stormy face or those ruby lips once again he might have lost his grip on reason.  
She accepted his silence and they continued to walk on in peace and it was some moments before he regained his composure. 

____

“Young Rose, do not mistake me. I enjoy your company a great deal, far more than most people I am surrounded by of late. But something tells me learning of my life as a lad was not the reason you wanted to talk to me in the first place,” he teased, walking slowly, hands folded in front of him.   
She looked to her hands and the rock sitting upon the golden band on her thin finger, twisting it gently, pretending in the back of her mind that the man next to her was in Cal’s place and they were on the voyage to America to marry.  
Rose could not imagine being upset by the prospect as she was with her real fiancé. They were similar, she and Mr. Andrews, of opinion and disposition and desire. The flip in her heart at the imagining was not missed, but it was sent away in the same way that she had witnessed Cal dismissing Trudy and the rest of their staff as if they were unimportant and inhuman, and she would treat her foolish little fantasy exactly the same. She _had_ to. 

____

“Well, I...I wanted to thank you for last night. Not only for pulling me back but...for your discretion.”   
“You’re very welcome, Young Rose, but you needn’t thank me. I did what any decent gentleman would’ve done.”  
She frowned but hid her face from his view. Why did she feel disappointed at that answer, why did she feel so disappointed in his classifying his actions as so general? _Why do I want to be a special occurrence to him?_  
“Hardly. I know many a gentleman who would have turned a blind eye all for the sake of their name. And speaking of such, I wanted to apologize as well. I’m sorry for forcing you into such a distressing situation and I’m sorry that I misjudged you so unkindly that I didn’t believe your good intentions at first. I hope you can forgive me.”   
Mr. Andrews’s face turned as serious as she had seen it since last night. “Please don’t apologize to me, Rose. There is nothing for you to be sorry for. I do not blame you for thinking the worst of me at first because I reckon that somehow ties with whatever made you climb over the railing, even if it is too forward of me to assume so.” 

____

Rose stared at him for a good long minute with only the wind sweeping between their bodies and the sound of the ocean rushing around them, disconcerted at just how unaffected she was by his overstep. It should have been an overstep, but to her, it was not. She could feel nothing within her but warmth as if she were being embraced; she felt safe, cared for, and, for the first time since she could remember, understood in some sense by someone who was equal to her in intelligence and inclination. 

____

“You...You’re not incorrect in your assumption,” she said, voice helplessly breaking, as she detoured from their path and went to lean upon the railing overlooking the sea, suddenly feeling violently sick.   
“Rose, I meant what I said last night. I should like to be your friend, and you can tell me what grieves you. I promise you that you can trust me.”   
_I do. I do believe you and I do trust you, and that's precisely what scares me so horribly._   
She turned to him, silent, giving him one last chance to escape her, to escape the weight of her woes, to feign his work or an appointment or a meeting and that she would not be insulted, but he stood, steadfast. Licking her lips, she looked away from his soft, caring eyes and tried to breathe through her suddenly restrictive corset. 

____

“Well, I…” she began, walking to the railing once again, away from the kindness of his face. “It was....everything. It was my whole world and everybody in it, and the inertia of my life, plunging ahead and me, powerless to stop it.”  
In a silent showing, she held up her hand to her, twisting her ring again for him to see, and those dark eyes told her that he understood what was left unspoken. 

____

_Of course, he does. He’s the only one who could._

____

“Five-hundred invitations have gone out, all of Philadelphia society will be there, and all the while I feel I’m...standing in the middle of a crowded room, screaming at the top of my lungs, and nobody even looks up!”   
Silence prevailed and the ocean waves reigned supreme again, allowing the time for the shame at her emotional outburst to set in like salt to a wound. She could have wept. She turned from him again and clenched her eyes shut to keep the petulant tears at bay behind her eyes. 

____

“Well, Rose, what do _you_ want?” 

____

She had never been asked such a question. For so long she had wanted to be asked it, and yet here she was, the very question hanging above them like the very steam from the smokestacks, and she was without a single word to say and her mind was rendered blank. What _did_ she want? And he had asked the question softly in a voice she had never heard, absent of the shy, boyish charm and lust for life that he always seemed to have, but serious, comforting, like a father or even like a—  
“What do I want?” Rose spoke without thought, hardly knowing she was doing it until she heard her own voice, passionate and angry in her own ears. “I want to be respected by people around me and not reduced to a child when it is convenient simply because I say something that is out of turn for society’s stuffy rules. I want to be able to work if I want to, be dependent only on myself and be able to feel like I deserve the things I receive. I don’t want to marry for profit or for convenience or for the happiness of anyone else. I want to live the life that I want to live, not the life Cal wants me to live, or my mother, or society! Oh, I’m so sick and tired of being held down by rules that mean nothing but mean everything all at once!”   
A deep exhale escaped her lungs and she covered her face with both hands, trying to let the ocean wind cool her raging temper as if it could penetrate her and reach her heart. 

____

“Then do that, Young Rose. Live the life that you want to.”

____

She turned to him, as scandalized as Rose DeWitt Bukater could bear to be. How could he make it sound like it was so simple when she was left drowning in the chains it all left strapped to her limbs? 

____

“You really think it that easy? To just up and abandon everything I know? I will be a social pariah, Mr. Andrews. My father’s good name is the only thing I have left besides debt, and my marriage to Cal is my only way to break free of it. I have no choice.”  
“There is always a choice, Rose. And you may not have discovered the way out yet, but the world has a right funny way of playing tricks on all we think we know. Don’t lose faith quite yet.”  
A light scoff from her kissed his cheek as it passed by him in the breeze; hard and sharp but not unkind. “I admire your optimism, Mr. Andrews. I’m sure your profession requires a lot of it, but my fate is sealed, I’m afraid. There is no way around it. Three days from now I will be led off this beautiful ship in chains and kept in chains for the rest of my days.” 

____

Their eyes met, understanding, brown and blue-green clashing like the most brilliant meeting of fresh and fertile earth. They drowned in one another as if pulling apart was like severing a magnetic attraction. She looked so lost, his poor Young Rose, so afraid and out of control, slightly put out with him that he would dare give her even an ounce of hope that was untrue, but there was an affection just behind her eyes that he hoped only he could see. And, dear _God,_ what he would not give to take her in his arms and— 

____

“Mother!” She exclaimed, a false and pained smile stretching on her face like someone was forcing her lips. 

____

Mrs. DeWitt Bukater, strait-laced and impassive as she was, simply stared at her daughter who had, just a minute ago, been standing at far too short a distance than what was appropriate between a gentleman and a spoken-for lady. Her expression of sheer disappointment and reprimand was sharper than any words she could have voiced. 

____

“Mother, you remember Mr. Thomas Andrews from luncheon yesterday. He saved me in my clumsiness last night. Without him, I would have fallen overboard.”   
Mr. Andrews and Ruth had been left bereft of proper introductions before luncheon yesterday, and so he smiled, clenching his fists, and bid her a, “A pleasure to properly meet you, madam.”  
“Charmed, I’m sure,” she replied, venomous as a snake, before turning back to Rose as if they had just been caught _in flagrante delicto._  
“Well, Mr. Andrews, you’re quite the man to have around!” Drawled Molly Brown, Bless her, unorthodox woman that she was. Besides each other, Mrs. Brown was the only one in which Mr. Andrews and Rose could both seek likeminded solace.   
The two women, the Countess of Rothes and Molly herself seemed impressed with Mr. Andrews and accepted him in his heroic and gentlemanly title, but Ruth DeWitt Bukater looked on him, nose in the air and eyes low and blatant in their dislike, like he was an insect, a dangerous insect which needed to be squashed quickly. 

____

Just then the bugle sounded and Molly turned to it before smacking her lips together and gayly shaking her head. “Why do they always insist on announcing dinner like a damned cavalry charge?”   
The four of them laughed in unison while Ruth remained silent.  
“I promise you, Mrs. Brown, I shall have that changed before _Titanic’s_ next voyage. I had been thinking just the same thing,” Mr. Andrews smiled.   
Rose winced and dared to look on her mother, sensing her prejudice because Mr. Andrews was a self-made man and proud of it and not an heir to a massive fortune placed atop a good and prominent name. While she hated it displayed at all, she could withstand such conduct with a roll of the eyes and a huff, but not to he who had been so kind to her, he who understood her better than anyone, save, perhaps, Mrs. Brown. 

____

“Shall we go dress, Mother?” Rose said, grabbing her arm perhaps more aggressively than she should have, ready to lead her as far as possible from him.   
She turned once more, affectionate smile plastered to her, unforced, “See you at dinner, Mr. Andrews. I trust you shall escort me?”   
Lost for words, he nodded to her and that was enough, for she beamed anew before turning away. 

____

His eyes followed her as she walked, dress glowing liquid gold in the sunset, hair burning a glorious fire, flanked on either side by her mother and the Countess. How desperately he tried to stop his mind from wandering, thinking of how compatible they were, how they agreed on things that would make heads turn until they fell off necks and would have the entirety of the _haut monde_ up in arms.  
Rose DeWitt Bukater was Thomas Andrews’s breath of fresh air and he did not know how he had gotten through thirty-nine years of life without her. 

____

“Thomas? Thomas!” He started and blinked back to life to see Molly still stood before him.   
“Forgive me, Molly. What is it?”  
She laughed aloud, anchoring a hand to his arm to steady herself. “Why, you couldn’t be more obvious if you wrote it on a piece of paper and pasted it to your head!”   
“Wrote what on a piece of paper? I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he had not had to play coy in many a year and his ability was rusty if her sarcastic, well-meaning nod was any evidence.   
“You are head over heels for little Miss Rose over there,” she pointed over her shoulder. “And don’t even try to deny it!”   
“I will deny it, Molly. That’s absurd! I’ve met her but twice! She’s young enough to be my daughter!” He had not even acknowledged such a fact before; it had simply been sitting in his mind unnoticed, and his heart sunk as he realized. 

____

Twenty-two years.  
He was _twenty-two years_ older than Rose.  
He had been nearing the end of his apprenticeship at Harland and Wolff when she was taking her first breaths. She was not even twelve when he had been appointed managing director and was just barely so when he began designing _Titanic._

____

Oh, _God,_ what had he been thinking? 

____

“I’m gonna tell you a secret,” Molly's calm, soothing voice coaxed him back to horrific reality. “Some of the most miserable lives have been led because they go on believing that such things matter in the long run. They don’t, Thomas. Not all of us are lucky to come by love or anything resembling it in this life, and if you are, don’t be moron enough to muck it up for a reason as stupid as that. You might not have known each other for long, but you’re attracted to her and she’s attracted to you and that is something you cannot deny to me, no matter how fast it’s happened. Try as you might, I can see right through the both of ya. I ain't one of them First-Class simpletons who don't see what's right in front of them. You’re similar and, by God, the chances of you two finding someone else in this crowd as compatible as you are is about as high as the chances of me being accepted by them. I ain’t saying that you should run away and elope, Thomas, but don’t kill what’s blossoming before you even notice it's alive. That’s all I’m sayin’. I’ll see you at dinner.”

____

With a satisfied smile, she turned, conspiratorially, and walked off as the bugle sounded again. Thomas Andrews sighed and fell against a column, staring out into the horizon, wondering how he would survive dinner sat right next to her with this wound ripped open by Molly. 

____

The last sound of the bugle called and he hesitantly walked forth towards what awaited him, trying as hard as he could to not notice how the golden sun and the red sky behind it perfectly resembled Rose in all her beautiful glory. 

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it, darlings.  
> Poor Mr. Andrews!  
> I worry sometimes that I'm moving the relationship too fast, but it was a rather limited timeframe, situation-wise.  
> I wonder if in this story Titanic will sink. I know that's how it should go but it is so terrible a tragedy and having the same thing happen in fiction stories and canon divergences about it makes me so sad to read! I always hope it'll end differently if we couldn't have that ending in real life or in the film, but would it be the same effect and story if it didn't?  
> Still, it really is how it should go. We shall see what will happen!  
> Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!  
> All my dearest, dearest love!
> 
> -m <3


	4. Of Dinners and Notes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a first-class dinner is conducted, and Thomas Andrews does a whole lot of thinking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am back, my darlings!  
> Let me just say, I am blown away by your feedback, and I am so very glad that you enjoy my story enough to message me or comment and ask me to update. Really, it keeps me going. I mean that with my whole heart.  
>  **A disclaimer:** In the movie _Titanic,_ I believe that the luncheon at the beginning and Rose's near-suicide happen on two separate days, April 11th and 12th. But for the sake of relationship development, I'm making the luncheon and the stern scene occur on the 11th. So now this is the 12th. :)

** _Friday,_ 12 April 1912 **

Dark eyes watched couples pass by like fish in an open sea, arm in arm and dressed to the nines. Calloused, skilled hands were folded before midnight black trousers, obliquely cut by the stark white of an evening shirt and bowtie. He was the only one standing alone in the Grand Hallway, the hallway he had designed, but he did not feel outcasted or alone. In fact, he relished it, for Thomas Andrews needed all the solitude he could possibly have before Rose DeWitt Bukater came down the Grand Staircase and was once more in his presence and was for the rest of the evening. 

_Head over heels,_ Molly said. _How ridiculous!_ he thought. 

He refused to entertain the voice in the back of his head sounding a great deal like Rose’s own seductive lilt, crooning, _But is it_ really _ridiculous? Truly, Mr. Andrews?_ repeatedly in his ear like an echo in a cathedral. 

The blasted fire-headed girl’s siren song was shattered like glass when he heard the shrill tittering of Ruth DeWitt Bukater as she walked down the wooden stairs, hair as red as her daughter’s but absent of all her beauty and magnetism. A wince coursed through his body as he also heard the low rumbling of Cal Hockley on her arm, boasting loudly about the seven-thousand tons of his family’s steel built into the ship with Ruth responding, nose in the air as always as if all the world were inferior to her, that, in that case, she knew who would be held accountable should something go wrong with _Titanic. His_ ship! Something going wrong! The nerve of them!  
_Oh,_ if he weren’t a gentleman, what he wouldn’t give to box their ears! 

Anger and resentment could not reside in him long, for it was as if an angel had descended to the landing of his staircase to christen his beloved _Titanic_ with an Almighty blessing.   
There she stood, adorned in a pink and black-laced gown, stones shimmering in the evening light, white satin gloves pulled over her elbows that blended with the snow of her arms. Suddenly the Grand Staircase was no longer his grand staircase of which he was so proud but was only the pathway to her, and as their eyes locked from the distance, everyone else faded from his view and it was only Rose. A smile was stretched on her coral lips and her blue-green eyes were alight with a shy relief, as well as a diablerie that fully betrayed her ladylike disposition as her hands clenched her skirt as if she were stopping herself running to him.

_Run to me, Rose. Run_ with _me._

The threshold was crossed and she finally stepped, descending towards him as he stood frozen with the spell of Rose DeWitt Bukater flowing thick in his veins. Her steps were slow and calculated as if hesitant, and yet their gazes were intertwined and, with every single stair, closer and closer, the precious details of her face became clearer and clearer. All too suddenly she was before him, looking down on him as if truly from Heaven above. They stared on one another with adoring eyes, their kindred souls embracing, and he took her silk-bedecked hand and pressed his lips to the back of her palm, warm with life. 

“Miss DeWitt Bukater,” he said, smiling gently, her name like a prayer on his lips.   
“Mr. Andrews,” she replied in turn, a giggle bubbling up as she kept her hand to him even as the seconds ticked past the appropriate.   
He said nothing but smirked at her kindly before offering her his elbow. He tried to quiet his heart’s song as she looped her arm with his lest she hear it, too. 

She reached out a silken hand and tugged on Cal’s arm. “Darling,” she said. “Surely, you remember Mr. Andrews.”   
Her fiancé’s face alighted with an antagonistic surprise. “Mr. Andrews! Why, you’re so seldom here with us for dinner, I hardly recognized you! Come to join the true gentlemen for dinner instead of that ship doctor, eh?”  
Besides a subtle tick in the right side of his jaw, Rose was astonished to see that Mr. Andrews’s forced smile never faltered and his face remained unchanged. “Yes, I suppose so.”   
Cal laughed a fake laugh, extending his arm to Ruth, “Extraordinary!”   
Once they promenaded away and she was free from the most judgmental of eyes, she could not help but turn her eyes to him, in awe. A tender smile spread across her face which he returned when his gaze met hers again.   
To everyone else in the room, with a single undiscerning glance, they figured Rose DeWitt Bukater and Thomas Andrews were a couple; handsome, new money, perhaps, devoted and unable to unhand each other, desperately and hopelessly in love.

* * *

Arm in arm they trailed a safe distance away from Ruth and Cal down to the Reception Room with the rest of the gentlefolk. _Like a funeral march,_ Rose thought to herself. They stepped off the stairs and settled near one of the wooden columns, surveying the scene of the well-to-dos conversing like it was an opera in Paris or one of those new moving pictures. A handful of people came up to Mr. Andrews, expressing their surprise at his attendance as if he were a celebrity among peasants, and he presented his true amiable, kind self in return, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries. Rose looked comfortably on, smiling and greeting when it was required of her but otherwise watched the habitual palaver of the _beau monde_ with a pococurante poise.   
As he was engaged uninterestedly in conversation with Mr. Astor about some real estate business or other, her eyes settled on the backs of her mother and fiancé’s heads. They were engaged in conversation with a perfunctory Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon and an animated Lady Lucille Duff-Gordon, where she heard her name mixed in with their chatter.   
“Congratulations, Hockley,” she heard said from Sir Cosmo’s hardly moving lips, feeling even from so far away his eyes looking her up and down for far longer than a man of his age and marital status should be allowed. “She’s splendid.”  
_She, splendid! Like a prized stallion or a purebred hound, but certainly not a lady!_ She fumed as she felt the pride and arrogance flowing from Cal like infected water. “Why, thank you,” he said with an imperious chortle.   
Gentle fingers touched her hand. When she looked up, Mr. Andrews was not gazing back at her but was shooting blazing daggers straight at the group a few feet in front of him, the ticking of his jaw incessant and his temples throbbing against his forehead. She realized his touch was not so much to comfort her but was an anchor for himself, and she gripped his hand back as secretly as could be afforded in so crowded a room, squeezing his fingers until she was sure it pained him. Had she not been afraid solely for his own image and nothing else, she would have kissed him square on the lips without any care to consequence. 

Mrs. Brown suddenly floated in front of them, beaming, sporting a costume only she could make look fashionable of a sparkling black frock with a matching feather attached to the back of her head. “Care to escort a lady to dinner?”  
Dear Molly, only she could bring cooling to his raging anger at such a moment. Mr. Andrews grinned to his dear friend. “Certainly!”  
“Sweetpea? Sweetpea!” Cal turned from a tittering Ruth, trying to catch her wandering attention.   
Rose clenched her fingers into Mr. Andrews’s bicep, a beg. _Don’t make me speak to him, not now._  
He turned to her, leaning to her ear and whispering, “Why, Miss DeWitt Bukater, did I tell you about…” 

They flowed like the ocean waves surrounding them out beyond into the dining room, various people sporting similar colors and styles engulfed in idle chatter. Such a view found Rose insistently bored. _Golly, had these people really never heard of a color wheel, or a single toe stepping out of the ordinary?_

“Hey, Astor!” Molly called in the most inherently improper way to the tall stick of a man, who stood with his all but child bride. Rose burned with joy within at the shadow of discomfort that quickly passed over his face unmasked.   
“Well, hello, Molly!” His smile was convincing enough that he thought it could fool the most foolish _nouveau riche._ “Rose, Thomas.”   
“Why, this must be Mr. Andrews! I don’t believe we’ve properly met. I’m Madeleine Astor,” the young girl perked up, nearly squealing, as she reached a small hand towards him.   
“An absolute pleasure, Mrs. Astor, to properly meet you,” he replied, soberly shaking her hand.   
As they parted and made their way towards their table, Rose did not miss the mischievous wink or the scrunch of the nose from her unscrupulous friend, nor the furious flush that made itself at home on her cheeks and throat as Madeleine beamed in the wake. 

* * *

Rose figured Mr. Andrews was nervous. Like she, he was inherently unaccustomed to the uppity manners of the first class, uncomfortable with the—in his opinion, undeserved—attention he received from creating _Titanic,_ and yet he never faltered. He never stumbled over a single word, nor was he lost on what to say after any question nor statement. 

Her mother, however, of course, could always be counted upon to bring tension to even the loosest situations. 

“So, tell me of your dinners with the ship doctor, Mr. Andrews,” she leered at him. Rose could almost see the snakes of Medusa peeking from the tufts of orange hair atop her head.   
He was bereft of speech for a moment and she was tempted to interlace their fingers, and such was the only sensation more barreling upon her than the scandalization that came with it.   
“Well, ma’am, they are quite enjoyable, to be sure. I would have brought Dr. O'Loughlin here tonight but I’m sure his attire would have been quite shocking to you all.”  
A polite round of chuckles purveyed about the table.   
“Yes, we finally got Mr. Andrews to join us for dinner tonight,” interjected Cal, keeping a dominating hand on the back of Rose’s chair. “He was of some assistance to my fiancée last night.”   
“I-It turns out that Mr. Andrews is quite a fine artist,” she leaned forward, desperate to change the subject lest some intrusive soul decide they desired to know just what sort of assistance Cal meant. “He was kind enough to show me some of his work today.”   
A view from her peripherals showed him smiling softly at her praise. _No!_ she commanded to her chest. _You’re not allowed to jump, nor leap, nor race! Not for him!_  
“Rose and I differ somewhat in our definition of fine art,” Cal replied with a sneer, spooning caviar to his plate before looking somewhat rudely over Rose’s figure to the man sat to her left. “Not to impugn your work, sir.”   
Mr. Andrews nodded his phlegmatic acceptance and dropped his eyes to his plate, loathe to look on that odious man for longer than was truly required of him. 

The waiters made their rounds across the table, one by one, as the tensed pair tried desperately to ignore the racing of their hearts and breaths and thoughts at the knowledge that one small shift in their seats would bring them to touch each other. They itched for it, _yearned_ for it. _God,_ how he wanted to touch her. 

“Well, she may be mine on paper,” the shrill, pretentious voice of Ismay prated from across the table. “But in the eyes of God, she belongs to Thomas Andrews.”  
_Fool of a man. Anyone with eyes can see that he basks in the attention, and even more so in the assumed selflessness of his handing off her credit to Mr. Andrews. Fool!_ Rose clenched her dress once again. She noticed Mr. Andrews trying to deflect the approaching recognition as he fumbled with his notebook, barely getting his pen out when he was properly addressed.   
“He knows every rivet in her, don’t you, Thomas?” _The damned man!_   
“Indeed,” he sibilated with a self-deprecating chuckle. 

She frowned. How she was amazed at him! For a moment she tried to wonder how she would feel if she had designed the most luxurious ship the world had ever seen and, what’s more, was sitting in her at that very moment! Why, she was sure she would bask in the praise, no matter how much principle would tell her to be demure and reserved and modest. And yet, she felt he were not simply following principle and decorum, but truly felt he deserved none of the commendations, and so she placed a hand on his clothed arm, squeezing lightly, a sensation unseen and only felt by them both. “Your ship is a wonder, Mr. Andrews. Truly.” 

Silence; nothing but the clanging of silverware and idle patter from the surrounding tables as all engaged awaited his response. He was lost, adrift, and her earnest sentiment and those lambent eyes were the only things holding him afloat. His face relaxed, eyebrows settling, lids falling slightly over his midnight eyes, and he smiled sincerely for the first time in what felt like his entire life.   
“Thank you, Rose.” It was pathetic, lackluster, inadequate, but it was all he could manage when she looked on him the way that she did. There was a word to describe that raging ocean within her eyes, four godforsaken letters that had been like a sword to his flesh these past days, teasing him with death, and yet he did not think it. He refused. _No._

“Tell us, Mr. Andrews, how it is you got into... _shipbuilding,”_ the last word was spoken with such disgust, such disdain, that her daughter was shocked that Ruth DeWitt Bukater’s tongue did not burn up and fall from her prideful lips.   
“Well, my uncle, Viscount Pirrie was really my prelude to it. I began an apprenticeship at his shipyard Harland and Wolff when I was sixteen and found that I had quite a passion for it.”   
“When you were sixteen, you say? That has to have been a few years before my Rose was born, hasn’t it?” 

It was doublespeak, a double-entendre, a circumlocution; it was meant to insult his age, and they both knew it fine and well. Rose’s jaw dropped and she hardly bothered to cover it with her hand, glaring at her mother with such hatred in her eyes it nearly pained her while the man next to her cleared his throat and swallowed with a loud gulp, looking at his plate again. 

“Yes, madam,” his voice croaked in what sounded like shame. “That would be correct.”   
“And so you made a career out of shipbuilding? With paupers and vagrants as your workers?”  
“I happen to find the 'paupers' and 'vagrants' to be fine people, Mrs. DeWitt Bukater. Finer than myself, no doubt. But it's not just shipbuilding, ma’am. I’m an architect and I design a ship’s every detail and I oversee her construction. Every second of it, I’m there, watching, making sure my plans are done justice. Once it's finished, I usually join on the maiden voyage and document her performance and any changes which should be made, as I am doing here on _Titanic._ And then, it’s to my next design.”   
“And you find that sort of rootless existence appealing, do you?” She glared at him from noxious blue eyes as she sipped slowly from her champagne.   
Both Molly and Rose’s eyes subtly bulged from their heads, their features unmoving in absolute odium and repugnance.   
“Why...yes, Mrs. DeWitt Bukater, I do. I’ve everything I need. I have the air in my lungs, ideas in my head and some blank sheets of paper always on hand. I find life much more gratifying not knowing day to day what shall happen or who I shall meet. To me, life is a gift and I’ve absolutely no intention of wasting it. I refused to live a life people wanted me to live and instead created the one I wanted for myself. I lead a life I love, even if it does not satisfy those around me. And that I shall never be ashamed of.”

No one said anything for some moments as the depth of his true words, straight from his soul, settled like dust upon the unthinking elites. 

Molly nodded. “Well said, Thomas.”  
“Hear, hear!” Exclaimed Gracie.   
“To leading a life you love,” Rose said quietly as if it were a private joke between them, her eyes never leaving him as she raised her glass into the air.   
_“To leading a life you love!”_ Was the collective cheer across the table.   
The glasses of Rose and Mr. Andrews were the only two to meet with a refined clink, a kiss of a touch they longed to give to each other but for which the crystal in their hands would have to suffice. 

Ruth purposely pushed her champagne glass away from her. “Well, Mr. Andrews, in that case, you must show us around your ship.”  
“I’d be honored,” he said honestly, giving a subtle glance to Rose. “What would you say to a tour tomorrow morning, Mrs. DeWitt Bukater?”   
He spoke it politely enough on the surface, but if you were to listen just underneath it you could hear the _casus belli_ in his voice. _I’ll show you every inch of what you take so easily for granted._

"Why, that sounds lovely,” she replied, thin rounded eyebrows almost to the top of her head, small smirk betraying the haughtiness within her. “Cal, Rose, I trust you’ll join.”   
Cal gave a bored nod of his head, hooded eyes set on his champagne as he took a sip. Rose felt her heart quicken in excitement as she gave a reserved, “Of course, Mother.” 

* * *

By the time the dessert trolley was making its rounds, Molly had taken the wheel of the dinner table, telling one of her tales, erupting the more unreserved into hoots and hollers with every sentence she spoke. Hearing one of darling Molly's stories was like unlacing your corset at the end of the day. She was a breath of fresh air in a room full of smoke and around her Rose felt free. 

“But Mr. Brown had no idea I’d hidden the money in the stove!” The woman cried with a guffaw, clapping her hands in delight as the select few around the table followed suit. “So he comes home, drunk as a pig celebratin’ and he lights a fire!”   
Ruth and Cal looked utterly miffed and phlegmatic, but, _oh,_ Rose laughed like she hadn’t in days, weeks, years. She laughed until tears pricked her eyes and didn’t stop even then, delighting in her release from propriety for even a few minutes, and she clapped and threw her head back and held her stomach when it began to ache. The man beside her was no different, hanging onto Molly’s every word and roaring with laughter so his teeth were shown just below his lips and the creases around his eyes presented themselves to everyone. It was not lost on Rose how positively beautiful he was when he was happy and laughing and for once she did not scold herself, not when the three of them were united in a magnificent display of emancipation. 

Let them think what they wanted to think, at least for now! Let them think she and Mr. Andrews were intertwined in some unsubtle and bumptious _affaire du cœur_ as they seemed to portray in their eyes as they looked on them whenever they chuckled towards each other. Let them imagine that she slipped into his chamber every night and he made violent love to her, loud and depraved and deliciously licentious to the shame and debasement of her mother and fiancé. _Oh,_ let them think! She would do it if she could. She _would!_ If only he wanted her as she did him. _If only..._

“Well,” drawled Colonel Gracie, standing, looking left and right to the men surrounding him. “Join me in a brandy, gentlemen?”   
Thomas ignored the summonsing of the group of his sex, rather like a bunch of cattle being called from grazing, and looked congenially to his teacup as the waiter poured fresh hot water into it for his tea.   
"Will you be joining us, Thomas?” he asked.   
He looked up with an amiable smile. “No, Archie, thank you. Perhaps tomorrow night. I’m feeling quite tired tonight.”   
“That’s just like him!” Piped Ismay with a faux affection, always eager to be the Master Shipbuilder’s personal ventriloquist, he the owner and Mr. Andrews the prized animal. “Working himself to exhaustion, always! Ladies, thank you for the pleasure of your company.”  
Cal leaned over, lips dangerously close to Rose’s snowy skin, “May I escort you back to the cabin?”  
His fiancée waved him off. “No, I’ll stay here.”   
Outnumbered, Mr. Andrews stood from his chair, giving a thankful nod to the staff who had waited on them, commending them as he did after every meal. Rose’s heart pounded. He turned to her, a concluding smile on his lips, looking almost sad.   
“Mr. Andrews, must you go?” She spoke it in a way that tried to attract nonchalance and simple politeness like a magnet, but it repulsed it and instead matched perfectly with the desperation she felt at not wanting him to leave her.   
“Forgive me, Young Rose. I don’t think myself suited for ladies’ chatter nor for the stuffy politics of the men tonight,” he said jestingly, hands behind his back.   
She giggled lightly, disappointment swimming in her eyes behind the earnest humor.   
“Goodnight, Rose.”  
He took her hand gently, wary of her mother’s scrutinizing gaze, and as she returned the gesture, he slipped a piece of paper into her palm, folded so many times over it was near invisible and could hardly be seen by the rest. A kiss was pressed to the back of her palm and he did not miss her sharp intake of breath, the rise of that smooth chest almost beyond the bearings of her corset and gown. He looked around and the group seemed none the wiser about his slipping her a note like a schoolboy to the girl of his inexperienced, young affections. He supposed architecture gave one a particular sleight of hand and, especially this night, he was grateful for it. 

She watched him as he retreated, walking elegantly around tables and chairs and past waiters to the doors that led him from her. The paper crinkled under her fingers and she started and caught his eyes just before he exited, looking at her with an imploring mischievousness. _Read it, Young Rose,_ they said.  
Her blue-green eyes danced around the room wary of any attention upon her. The only gaze which met hers was Molly Brown’s just a few chairs away from her, a small smirk painted on her lips like artwork, eyes glimmering. She knew; she had seen him slip her the paper, she had felt the tension radiating off them which went right over everyone else’s head either by sheer stupidity or convenience. She had known she was right in what she had said to him out on the deck, she had _just known!_  
Rose found that Molly was the single person on this ship, in the whole world, that she could bear knowing of her attraction, feelings—oh, no word sounded right to describe the feeling in her chest!—for Mr. Andrews and begged her with wide eyes to not tell anyone. In response, the dynamic woman lifted her chin in the air and sipped at her tea, straight-faced, looking away as if she had not seen a thing out of the ordinary. She remained for a moment before glancing back at the girl, lips ticking up again, and gave her a wink. Rose smiled back, breathing a sigh of relief, and let her hands fall to her lap as she unraveled the paper, revealing a note written in elegant, looped cursive. 

**_Lead a life you love, Young Rose. Meet me at the clock._**

Rose jumped within her chair, eyes flying to the doors as if they somehow had the answers for all the questions that were suddenly banging against her head like enemy fire. She was aware of her mother’s sharp glower on her back but she did not care. She took a deep breath, struggling to steady herself back to a state of composure.   
_Did this mean...? Could he…? Did he…?_

She truly did remark at her capabilities of feigning normalcy. It was so convincing, even to her mother—whose features dropped shoulders relaxed, any imminent threat to their reputation avoided for now—that she figured perhaps when they reached America she would become an actress. The conversation had reached her and she smiled a charming smile that reached her eyes as she exchanged just the right badinage, tittering and gasping when it was required. Some minutes passed, how many she could not be sure for her heart was thudding far too fast for reason; a respectable amount at least. She stood slowly, mindful of her body trembling in apprehension and excitement and excused herself, pleading a headache. So caught up in her task for inconspicuousness was she that she did not see Molly looking positively delighted as she exited, pressing her hands together joyfully and smiling until her cheeks hurt, with the rest of the supercilious women at the table overlooking it as one of her crass eccentricities. 

* * *

The clock ticked, every second an added thought of trepidation that he had been far too forward and she would not come. Every new minute with which it taunted him, he cursed himself anew. _  
Just a moment,_ he thought. _The clock is twenty seconds fast. Must get that fixed when we get to New York. And is the glass scratched? That will_ not _do, not on_ Titanic. 

The clock chimed its low, lilted chime as the hour hand reached nine o’clock. Perhaps he should give up and walk back to his chamber, perhaps he should attempt to avoid the girl possessing his every thought for the rest of the voyage until they alighted in New York. Then he would never see her again. Then he could return home to Ireland and begin the slow, grueling task of forgetting about Rose DeWitt Bukater. 

_No._ That was _impossible._ He could _never_ forget her. He could never forget how their very thoughts were intertwined like vines, their queerness in the eyes of all the rest of their peers like a sealant keeping them together. Nor could he ever forget her beauty, the raging fire of her ringlets matching perfectly the flame residing within her, stoked by the opportunity for adventure or risk or rebellion, the perfect pearlescence of her skin, those sparkling blue-green eyes like water to cool her scarlet blaze. He could not forget her, nor could he bear the thought of avoiding her, but as the clock chimed nine o’clock, he could not help but feel he had made a grave mistake and she was not coming.   
His eyes clenched shut and he gripped the railing just a bit tighter in his hands, ignoring the thought of the fingerprints he would be leaving on the newly polished wood. The turmoil churning inside him prevented him from hearing the nervous, shaky exhale at the bottom of the stairs, nor the tinkling of stones as skirts were grabbed in silk-covered hands or the clicking of heels on the wooden steps.

His soul must have called to him; that’s the only reason he could present for why he turned. It must have been some sick form of hope, as if his wanting it so terribly would cause her to materialize before him. But yet she was already there, smiling, nearly shrinking away from him. He supposed he had never smiled so deeply nor so brightly as he observed her in all her beautiful, angelic glory. They stood for some moments, their eyes fused to each other’s, an indecorous privilege afforded to only the two of them, the only two people in the whole of their class who truly understood each other down to the depths of themselves rather than the flimsy fronts they all felt the need to place upon themselves like a suit of armor against human emotion and feeling. He could not help smiling again. _Oh, what freedom this was!_

“So, my dear Young Rose, would you like to go to a _real_ party?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it, my dears! I hope it lives up to your expectations and liking!  
> Poor darlings! Confused and in love (even though they don't know it)!  
> It won't be long now; this pot will soon boil over! ;)  
> I shall be back with you in a moment, darlings.  
> I love this story so much. I _promise_ I won't leave you hanging for too terribly long!
> 
> All my love, 
> 
> -m <3


	5. Of Irish Parties and Confrontations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rose and Mr. Andrews dance their hearts out and Bruce Ismay has quite a lot to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, angels!  
> I am back again. I promised you I wouldn't be gone too long!  
> Again, I'm not 100% satisfied with this chapter. One day I'll probably end up completely revamping this story as I've been less than impressed with what I've produced of late.  
> Either way, I truly hope you enjoy it, and thank you all for sticking around and for 135 HITS!!!  
> Your comments make me smile so very much. I love hearing what you think and making friends with you!  
> It means the world and I love you all. I really, really do.

** _Friday,_ 12 April 1912 **

“Wait here for five minutes and then meet me in the Reading and Writing Room.” 

He had whispered the request to her with a gentle voice, larking, before he kissed her hand again and slipped away from her like water through her fingers. Never had minutes and seconds moved so slowly for Rose. She clenched her dress in her fists until her knuckles went white and pressed her teeth together until her jaws began to ache, trying to curb her frustration as the clock seemed to taunt her, _You are at my mercy, now suffer while I take my time._  
When the minute hand finally showed her an ounce of goodwill and slithered over the first elegant numeral, it took everything within her not to seize her skirts in her hands and run up the two flights of stairs and down the deck, straight to their meeting place. _No,_ she told herself. _You have waited this long for happiness, for someone who understands you. You can conduct yourself as a lady for five more minutes._

She took a breath, inhaling until her corset began to dig painfully into her skin and her breasts were squished back into her chest. With its release, she let go with it every sense of apprehension that tainted her heart’s sweet melody with a foul note, as well as any guilt she felt towards betraying the wishes of those who had never done her any kindness but carve her into a hollow sculpture of what she was expected to be. She tried to imagine Cal, disappointed in her deeds of sneaking away with the Shipbuilder with whatever intention he had for them that evening.   
His face did not appear behind her eyes. Instead, it was Mr. Andrews, holding her hand with that sweet, kindly smile on his lips, speaking to her as if she were the most beloved thing in the world. With this thought, she walked, straight-backed, one foot in front of the other as she had been taught since infancy.   
Ladies and gentlemen passed by her, speaking her name in greeting, but she paid them no mind and did not burden her brain with trying to remember what their names were or to what fortune they were heirs or heiresses; she simply nodded in acknowledgment as she sauntered on, sober of face, a strange strike of joy crashing in her bosom like lightning when they smiled approvingly at her.   
_Oh, how little they knew._  
If only they knew that beyond her superficial gentility, in a roaring mind hidden behind embellished gowns and proper breeding, she imagined herself and Mr. Andrews in the shadowy Reading and Writing Room, kissing until their lips were ruby red and swollen and the only sound that disturbed the silence was their panting breaths, her fingers entangled in his canescent hair, his falling dangerously low on the small of her back in sure betrayal of shy Mr. Andrews’s true conduct.   
She was forced to bite her lip to keep from grinning like a madwoman. 

The air upon the A-Deck was frigid and had Rose not been warm of body from her imaginings she would have wished she had her shawl. The ocean air was thick with salt, sticking to her skin like a thousand little kisses of ice. Overhead, the stars blazed as if winking at her, congratulating her on her escapade with their own impish kind of approval. There was no moon, she noticed; there was simply a lunar glow where it should have been, the slightest sliver of gold if she squinted her eyes like a curved scar in the sky. She felt as if she were navigating a room without a candle and she walked on blind but determined. It almost felt as though the entrance of the room gleamed with an absent light, like it was leading her to it, to her future and the fate she so desperately craved for herself all wrapped up and tied together in a kind Irish man waiting within the doors for her. 

At last, free from prying and unwelcome eyes, she sprinted, throwing open the door and coming to a stop inside the black room, heaving for breath against her corset. She turned her head, unaware if he was there waiting for her.   
She felt no presence nearby, did not feel the warmth of another body anywhere close to her, but yet she remained planted in the same spot, waiting. Distantly, in some corner of her mind, she wondered if he were playing a cruel prank on her like she were a dog and he was waving a bone before her face and so suddenly ripped it away. Her breathing quieted at last and it was silent, far too silent for there to be someone else in the same room. Panic bloomed in her chest, quickly bleeding together with shame. 

“Young Rose,” came the sharp whisper as her hand was suddenly grasped. Rose exclaimed, crying out louder than she intended, and would have fallen in surprise of her arm and hand were not quickly grappled with tight but soft fingers. She noted distantly that the hold upon her limb was exactly what she felt when she had nearly slipped to her death off the stern of _Titanic_ and the hands which held her felt just the same; loving, affectionate, creative. Thomas Andrews was before her, she was sure of it. 

“Mr. Andrews!” she lowered her voice to a low mutter, laying her hand atop his. “You frightened me!”   
“Forgive me. I did not mean to.” 

They unhanded each other and she straightened her back. Her eyes began to ache trying to make out his dark silhouette. She laughed and looked to her slippered feet as if embarrassed, despite knowing he could not see her any better than she could see him.   
“Is this the party you spoke of, sir? Because this is quite a soulless party if it is,” she jested.   
“I’d expect you to have more faith in me, Young Rose. No, this is not it. I simply thought we should meet here lest people see us walking together through the Reception Room. This is the Reading and Writing Room. It’s hardly used and hasn’t been since the second day of the voyage so I said to cut off the lights to save power. I suppose I shall have more staterooms built instead.”  
“That is a shame. From what shapes I can make out, it’s a beautiful room.” 

They both guffawed at that. _She had made him laugh!_ Sometimes the smaller wonders of life made their heart fly higher and faster than anything else, and Rose figured hers was flying so quickly it would reach New York before they did. 

She heard him shifting as he went to the door, looking both ways before she barely saw him wave her over. He smiled, his teeth gently illuminated by the lanterns out on the deck, and took her hand with slight hesitation.   
“Are you ready, Rose?” He asked conspiratorially, murmuring it to her as if they were about to commit a bank robbery.   
She laughed. “Of course I’m ready, Mr. Andrews.” 

Without another word, he rushed out, pulling her with him as they both chuckled. She bunched her skirts within her hands as they raced down the promenade and down the stairs to the stern. By now she was utterly confused, and she displayed this on her face as they were now both in the light and could see clearly each other.   
“Have you been down to the Third-Class, Rose?”   
“No, of course not! Mother would have a fit!”   
“Well, in that case, perhaps you shouldn’t. I wouldn’t want to cause an argument.” 

It clicked within her head; they stood before the stairs leading to the Second and Third-Class cabins and he intended to take her down there, improper as it was. Oh, the devilish delight that filled her!   
He looked afraid, lips turned downward in disappointment, refusing to look at her and gazing instead at his folded hands. Though she knew he would rather be caught dead than be seen going into the Third-Class cabins, Rose again could not help but imagine the situation if he were Cal. If he had been, she would have been dragged down there no matter how much she protested, even if her arm was being ripped from its socket and she was crying in pain. To Cal the only pleasure that mattered was his and she was simply collateral damage in the pursuit of it. And yet, she stood before this man, bashful and quiet and modest, who was allowing her a way out. _And, what’s more,_ she thought, _he wants me to go with him!_

She could not bear to keep him waiting any longer and she grabbed unscrupulously his hand, intertwining their fingers as she had been dreaming of doing. Mr. Andrews looked up to her, shining with hope. They spoke no words but communicated through glimmers in their eyes, and within a moment beaming grins spread across their faces as they laughed in their mutual private understanding before he tugged her tenderly down the stairs. 

It felt like more than a doorway to a section of a ship to Rose; it felt like a threshold was being crossed and she was transforming as a person, privy to the ways of those with whom she felt most at home, unthreaded from the rigid knots of tradition. And she realized there was no one else whose hand she would rather be holding at that moment than Thomas Andrews’s hand. 

* * *

The fiddle was the first thing to reach her ears, graduating from a dull thumping vibration beneath her feet to the merry confluence of the bow to the strings. Next, she heard the half-drunken, rowdy raving of the steerage passengers, shouting and clapping and stamping their feet in delight; Irish accents, Swedish and English and Austrian all blended with one another in a glorious gallimaufry of fraternization.   
Rose grinned; standing among these dear loutish people celebrating life simply for the fact that they were alive and living it, surrounded by clumsy but jubilating music and the earthy smell of beer with Thomas Andrews’s arm entwined with hers was all she had ever wanted and needed and never knew until that very moment. 

Some looked shocked at the obviously aristocratic girl walking apprehensively into the Third-Class General Room, but rather than sneer at her, they looked almost overjoyed at the prospect of such exalted company. There were no snobbish glares over pinched noses and raised chins at an outsider entering their domain; Rose, in all her silken and laced glory, was smiled on. Her attire and highbred mannerisms were insignificant and her accompaniment by the pariah of the elites for his unbiased and nonpartisan kindness to all solidified her in their good graces. 

“Well, I’ll be goddamned!” A zesty, boyish voice shouted over the loud Irish folk music being played with much enthusiasm by the band, and Rose heard the firm clap of a hand to Mr. Andrews’s shoulder. “I know you said you’d come, Mr. Andrews, but I never woulda guessed you were telling the truth!”   
“Ah, Jack! I think I should be insulted by your doubting me. Never doubt an Irishman when he gives his word!” He laughed, fondly looking at the young man.   
“Do me eyes deceive me? Is that Thomas Andrews I see?” A brogue even stronger than Mr. Andrews’s became louder as the owner of it approached them. “Aye, I told you he’d come! Better pay up, Dawson. You owe me two quid!”   
“See? The Irish never doubt the Irish!” Mr. Andrews bellowed.   
He turned to Rose who looked incongruous and patted her arm to get her attention. “Rose, I’d like to introduce you to Jack Dawson and Tommy Ryan. Call them friends of mine. Jack, Tommy, this is Miss Rose DeWitt Bukater.” 

Standing before her were two men of roughly of the same height, one lithe and blonde with playful eyes, the other bulky and defiant with a kind and welcoming smile and a mop of auburn curls resting under a bowler hat. She wanted to wrap them up in her arms and kiss them repeatedly for looking at her so familiarly, as if she were a childhood friend they had not seen for a number of years but with whom they shared a special kinship that time did not alter.   
“A pleasure to meet you, Miss DeWitt Bukater,” The blonde, Jack, was the first to reach for her, tugging on her arm just hard enough that it seemed he wanted to embrace her but refrained.   
“Rose, please. Wonderful to meet you, Mr. Dawson.”  
“Agh! None of that Mr. Dawson crock! It’s just Jack.”  
“Hi. Lovely to meet ya, Rose,” said Tommy, smoothly shaking her hand, holding it for a few moments longer than what she was used to.   
“Ah! Ah! He come! He come!” A nearly indecipherable shrill Italian timbre exclaimed as an olive-skinned man came over and punched Jack in the collarbone. “He come. You pay.”   
“I know, I know! You’ll get your money, boys,” he raised his hands in surrender. “Fabrizio, meet Rose. She’s our new friend.”   
“Ah, Rose!” He exclaimed, seizing her by the shoulders and kissing her animatedly on each cheek, catching her positively off guard. _“E una ragazza così bella da avere con noi stasera!”_  
“What did he say?” She asked Jack.   
“Nevermind.” He laughed. “I’ve long since given up on trying to understand him.” 

The song ended with a final note, applause coursing about the room in varying degrees of vigor. Only a slight pause lasted before they began again, a faster-paced melody that made one want to do nothing but gambol and cheer along.   
A little girl, no older than six, adorned with brunette ringlets and rosy cheeks skipped up to them and tugged on Jack’s rolled-up shirtsleeve. “Cora, my best girl! You ready for our dance?”  
Cora bashfully nodded, taking his proffered hand and intertwining their fingers. Tommy departed to engage in an arm wrestle with a large and intimidating looking Swede and Fabrizio was leading a blonde lady in a fumbling attempt at a jig. Mr. Andrews took her hand, bringing Rose’s attention back to him. They lost each other in a gaze for a moment, swimming with affection heightened by the surrounding utopia, before he grinned and said, “May I have this dance, Young Rose?”  
She felt the blood drain from her face and her light smile blew from her lips like a tree in a cyclone, suddenly afraid. “B-But...I don’t know the steps.”  
He chortled, maneuvering her into position despite her determination to protest, one of his hands laced with hers and the other on the small of her back. “Nobody does, Rose. Don’t think, just move with me.” 

He draped his dinner jacket over the back of Tommy’s chair before he swept her within his arms and brought her to the middle of the floor. A single peruse about the room told Rose that Mr. Andrews had been correct; there was no set dance, and every couple was doing something different; some jumping, some spinning and waltzing, but no chosen movements to which everyone else was confined. He led her, galloping and capering in circles about the room, passing by others like motorcars and horses on the streets of Philadelphia. It felt so right and settled in her veins like lifeblood; this informality, this waltz with no real steps, the sweat shining freely upon her skin as she was pressed far closer to Mr. Andrews than her mother would ever be able to bear should she have seen them. It was like a lifetime of pent-up strain was finally being relieved and she pressed her forehead in a ghost of a touch to his shoulder, letting her body shake with laughter. Just barely she made out the rumble of his own chuckles brushing her ear like a loving caress. 

A new round of hoots and hollers reached her ears and she dared to look up, seeing Fabrizio and Helga atop a makeshift stage, front and center, twirling about each other as the steerage passengers below lauded and clapped, the band beginning to play louder and faster. A look upon her partner told Rose that Mr. Andrews had noticed them as well, and the simper growing on his face made her suddenly nervous.   
“Come with me,” he said, stopping them in their tracks and catching her as she fell forward, entwining their fingers again and pulling her up to stand next to the couple.   
She looked at the expectant yet kind eyes all upon her and she felt herself shrink back, tempted to jump back down and run, but the grin on Mr. Andrews’s lips stopped her in her tracks. Suddenly, he broke out into an Irish step dance, quick and complicated footwork the likes of which she had never seen at any silver-spoon gala or party to which she had ever been. 

She marveled at him. He moved with an ease that could only be equated to the jubilation of an Irishman when just enough good spirits and lively music were blended. His steps were fluid and reminiscent as if displaying with each touch of his feet to the floor a memory from his days in Ireland about which Rose so craved to know. The look on his face was one of pure felicity, dancing the dance of his true people. She realized that this was the real Thomas Andrews, the Thomas Andrews unburdened and unburied by the confines to which they were both doomed, uninhibited and absolutely, undeniably free. As he moved to the tune of the jig playing behind them and the stamping of the steerage men’s boots and the rhythmic applause of the women watching him, she realized he loved this dance, these people, this life, more than he loved even _Titanic._  
He stole a look at her, cheeks red (with exertion or shyness, Rose could not decipher), looking for a sort of approval as he was so wont to do.   
Her heart raced as, instead of speaking, she quickly pulled off her slippers, throwing them to Jack who stood just below, watching them with Cora at his side. She lifted her skirts and, with clumsiness and naivety overwritten by her sheer determination, mimicked with her stockinged feet his same moves. Mr. Andrews watched her carefully, keeping scrutinizing eyes on the movement of her feet, smiling slightly at her daredevilry and agility. She smirked at him, daring him with mirthful eyes and he danced again before they took turns in a duel of dexterity, the quintet playing faster still.   
Both smiling, mentally declaring the other the winner of their battle, they joined hands tightly and began spinning in a circle with the end of the tune approaching, moving in tandem with Fabrizio and Helga and the rest of the courageous upon the stage. They looked into each other’s eyes, brown fighting blue-green for the dominance of sweltering and simmering affection and admiration, laughing and gabbling in jubilation. 

The jig ended in a flourish, the entire room erupting in a drunken and thunderous ovation. The musicians smiled, nodding their appreciation, thanking the crowd before beginning again. The architect of the _RMS Titanic_ held politely his First-Class companion as they stepped down from the stage, allowing the rest to continue in their increasingly bungling polkas. 

"Excuse me, sir," Jack tapped Mr. Andrews, speaking in a faux posh English accent. "May I cut in and have a turn?"  
"Certainly, sir," he played along with a chuckle, looking down to Cora hiding behind the boy's legs. "And may I have a turn with your favorite girl, here?"  
"Sure thing, but don't you go coaxing her to your side, Andrews!" He shook a finger at him and turned to the girl. "You're still my best girl, Cora, don't worry! And don't let him tell you any bad things about me!" Cora smiled and giggled, nodding her head with a flush of her little cheeks.

Jack stepped forward and politely laid his hand upon Rose's waist, taking her hand in his, damp with perspiration from a night well spent. She twinkled at him, looking over his shoulder as the next jig was just beginning, seeing Mr. Andrews kneel before the sweet-looking girl and offering his hand to her with a kind, "May I have this dance, Miss Cora?" to which her face mantled and she shyly nodded, taking his hand and stepping her small feet onto his boots as they broke out into a waltz. 

Rose's bosom could hardly handle how her heart swelled in tenderness. The true and honest smile on Mr. Andrews's lips as he stared lovingly down at this child he hardly knew but admired simply by her spirit, and the happiness upon Cora's face when normally she would have fled from any stranger save Jack was more beautiful to her than any of the paintings at which Cal had thrown money and hung on her walls. It was all the confirmation she needed to know that Thomas Andrews was winding and weaving his way into her guarded heart in a way no one ever had or attempted, whether she liked it or not. 

She had not even noticed they had begun their circles about the room until she heard Jack say her name. _"Hey!_ Earth to Rose!"  
With a start, she blinked and looked to the blue-eyed man, startled at his knowing smirk as he laughed. "Hey, I know I'm no Harold Lockwood, but couldn't you at least _try_ to make a man feel wanted, even for a single dance?"  
"Forgive me, Jack. I don't know where my mind was just now," she flushed.  
"Oh, I know _exactly_ where it was. It was on Mr. Andrews over there. You couldn't be more obvious if you tried, Rose."  
"I don't know what you mean," she jutted her chin out and set her lips.  
"Oh, yes, you do. You're smitten with him, and who could blame you? He's good lookin' _and_ he's a damned genius. It's just an added bonus that he feels exactly the same way about you as you do about him."  
Rose gasped. "Why, don't be absurd! I don't feel that way for Mr. Andrews and he _certainly_ doesn't feel that way about me! You must be mad! We're simply friends, is all!"  
Jack snorted. "Yeah, because friends all but drool when looking at each other. I suppose I've been looking at my friends all wrong this whole time."  
Sputtering, she said pathetically, "W-Well...maybe you have!"  
"Whatever you say. But for what it's worth, I think you and Mr. Andrews are perfect for each other. You're not stuffy with First-Class rules and neither is he, and that's real hard to find, Rose," he replied with a genuine smile and a shake of his head.  
She was through with folly, looking up to him with sparkling eyes, aghast. "Y-You really think so?" 

Jack hummed his assent and she finally relaxed to a smile, and the rest of the dance was spent in happy comfortability for, next to Mr. Andrews's, Rose had never felt more at home in anyone's arms than she did in Jack Dawson's.

When the jig ceased and Rose had jumped and skipped until her body and mind were unfettered and slackened, the blonde man bowed to her, kissing her hand with a waggish wink, jerking his head slightly in the direction of Andrews kneeled before Cora. She was warmed to the very core of her heart when she saw the girl grin brightly and wrapped her young arms around his neck with something he said, and he was unashamed in returning the gesture, holding her for a few brief moments before Jack cut in and the child was once more distracted.  
Mr. Andrews righted himself, scanning the crowd until he saw her standing alone.  
He smiled as she walked back to him, heart pounding incessantly, wondering if the love with which it thrummed was soon to be claimed. 

Tommy was still sitting at the table, closely flanked by men of every nationality, the need for speech supplanted by the intensity of their arm wrestle. Mr. Andrews skillfully, with the same sleight of hand he used in slipping Rose his note, reached between them and grabbed two untouched tumblers filled to the brim with stout. He handed one to Rose, expecting her to take dainty sips by force of habit, and was stunned stiff when she chugged the beer faster than he did, downing the entire glass before he had finished half. She looked at him, smirking at his raised eyebrows and slacked jaw.   
“What? You think a First-Class girl can’t drink?” She attempted to look affronted but broke out into giggles as she heaved for breath. 

All was silent about them until the bigger man wrenched his and Tommy’s arms over the table, knocking over half-full glasses and erupting the men and women about them into cheers.   
“Two out of three, two out of three!” The Irishman exclaimed, cigarette hanging stuck to his bottom lip.   
The two of them were just about to wrestle anew when Rose walked forward, placing her glass with a loud emphasized thump on the table between their joining hands.   
“So,” she exclaimed over the music and bellowing of the crowd, reaching forward and audaciously swiped Tommy’s cigarette before taking a drag. “You think you’re big tough men? Let’s see you do this.”  
She backed up next to Andrews again, taking her skirts and shoving them into his hands. “Hold this for me, Mr. Andrews, please. Hold it up!”   
The Master Shipbuilder complied, inclining the fabric in a show of black and coral as the girl closed her eyes, taking a deep breath and assuming a first position stance. He nearly laughed at the engaged and utterly confused faces of the people before them, waiting for whatever it was she was going to do. She lifted herself onto her toes, pushing until all of her body weight was upon her halluces.   
Their jaws dropped in tandem, eyes bulging in shock and amazement as Rose’s face screwed up in pain. She held the stance for a few seconds before crying out with a loud, “Ow!” and falling forward into Andrews’s arms, the cigarette still clasped between two fingers. 

How close they suddenly were, his warm hands upon her back and hers around his neck, and only a few unseeable inches did they need to move for him to kiss her. Their smiles disappeared in realization and her heart thudded so roughly in her chest she could barely breathe. _He was going to kiss her!_  
He was moving his hand to touch her cheek as he had been thinking of for the past days, and enough boldness which he would have never normally possessed, kindly kindled by the thrills of the night as well as alcohol and pure desire, had accumulated within him that he was going to kiss her at long last. And by the look upon her face—hooded and smoky eyes, flushed cheeks and parted lips—she wanted it just as terribly as he did. _He would do it. He would._

Alas, their reverie was destroyed by the stunned applause of the group around them, one woman crying an astonished, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”   
Rose nearly sobbed as she tightened her arm around his neck, as if holding him closer would somehow rekindle the moment in which they had been so happily existing, just on the brink of culmination. He smiled sadly at her and said, “Are you alright?”  
She giggled despite herself. “I haven’t done that in years!” 

They did not unhand each other for some moments, laughing in each other’s arms, forgetful of every other soul around them who posed an interruption to their passion. So caught up were they that they did not notice the scowling face of Lovejoy standing upon the stairs below the door to the well deck, scanning the crowd like a searchlight for a head of fiery hair. He caught sight of them, her hand laced with Thomas Andrews’s as they joined in a chain dance, laughing and galloping with the rest. He squinted, watching them for some minutes. They were none the wiser, and, with an inimical smile, he shut the door again. 

* * *

The night was frigid and the deck empty, and Rose and Mr. Andrews walked peacefully and unashamedly, heading towards the First-Class entrance, the strike of midnight to their carriage, when all they wanted to do was turn and go back to the group below. Andrews was humming a familiar tune as they passed by the lifeboats.   
“What is it you’re humming?” She asked him, tugging on his arm.   
“Come Josephine in My Flying Machine.”   
“Why, I must say I am surprised, Mr. Andrews! I never would have taken you for a man who listens to popular music!” Rose jested, crippling forward in a fit of intoxicated giggles.   
“As I hope I have demonstrated clearly enough tonight, Young Rose, I am a man full of surprises,” he smiled kindly down at her, their eyes furious with the magnetic connection once again, loathe to break it.   
_“Come Josephine in my flying machine, going up she goes! Up she goes!”_ She chanted, throwing their joined hands together up to the sky and swinging their arms in the icy wind.   
_“Balance yourself like a bird on a beam, in the air she goes! There she goes!”_  
They paid no mind to the White Star Line seaman standing aside who raised an eyebrow at them as they passed by, and Rose snickered into his ear after they walked past before they sang together again.   
_“Up, up, a little bit higher! Oh, my! The moon is on fire! Come Josephine in my flying machine, going up, all on, goodbye!”_

The alight entrance to the First-Class stood in front of them like the stocks below the blade of a guillotine. They froze, reluctant to move, reluctant to enter. The sophisticated melody of Wally Hartley’s orchestra spilled through the doors, hauntingly beautiful in its confinement. Rose wondered how Mr. Hartley would fare below decks, what kind of music he would play with his prized violin, how he would conduct himself free from elite rules. She got a thrill at the thought of him sitting beside the fiddle player, them drawing the bows frantically across the strings as they stamped their feet to the rhythm in a way he had never been allowed. After all, he looked like a man who was bubbling with mischief just like she and Mr. Andrews; perhaps that’s why she liked him so very much. 

Rose grabbed hold of one of Mr. Andrews’s prized davits and leaned her head back to stare at the constellations in the frozen sky. “Isn’t it magnificent? So grand and endless.”   
She walked as if on air to the rail, leaning over it towards the black ocean which she had not truly done since the night the man behind her rescued her. This time, she was not filled with hopelessness or a yearning for all of life to stop; she wanted now for life to go forward more than ever, blazing with more ferocity than it ever had, roaring and unceremonious as she had briefly experienced that night.   
“They’re such small people, Mr. Andrews, our crowd,” she spoke as if in a dream, voice wistful for something she had never truly known. “They think they’re giants on earth but they’re not even dust in God’s eye. They live inside this tiny champagne bubble and someday the bubble’s going to burst.”  
There was nothing he could think to say; she knew already by now that he shared in her sentiment and he could not bear to lie and refute her as if the aristocracy were untouchable in its perfection and she was wrong to bear the grievances she did. He walked beside her, extending his forearms out, the side of his hand barely brushing her own.  
She clenched her eyes shut, taking a deep breath. There was that feeling inside her again; the crackling and hissing of desire and melting affection, the sensation that her soul had finally found in him the key to its chains and with the slightest fleeting touch of flesh it spouted golden wings and soared freely to the cosmos. 

Rose gasped as she threw her head back. “Look! A shooting star!”   
The silvery star, unburdened by the glow of the absent moon, cut obliquely a gaping streak into the continuous and rhythmic sky. The sky was downtrodden with the same punctilios as they, the pattern unchanged and undisturbed, and to Rose, that shooting star symbolized herself and Mr. Andrews. They were a joined force of dissent, burning brightly while they ripped through the orthodox as they had while they danced their hearts out, until happiness unlike any she had ever known was captured and adorned her like a royal mantle.   
“That was a long one,” Mr. Andrews mused. “When I was a lad back home in Ireland, my father used to say whenever you saw a shooting star, it was a soul going to Heaven.”  
“I like that." She smiled. "Aren’t we supposed to wish on it?”   
"What would you wish for, Young Rose?" He finally turned to her, noticing how they had unwittingly moved closer until the heat of their respective bodies could be felt on the other.  
He could almost hear her shivering in the cold ocean wind. They were almost as close as they had been in the general room, and their lack of touch somehow alighted the moment to a more fiery ache of the heart, dragged further from what they desired.   
She smiled with sad eyes, "Something I can't have."   
There was not a soul around; he could, in an instant, before she could consider what was happening, sweep her into his arms and kiss her with the ocean as their only witness. The boldness, though dulled by the cold and sobering night, returned to him. _He would do it. He would._

_“Andrews!”_ A bellowing, shrill voice cut on the tension surrounding them like a knife to a teacake. It was Ismay. _“For God’s sake,_ man, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”   
Rose and Mr. Andrews whipped around, gripping the railing for purchase, guilty without a crime. Their mutual eyes were wide, staring at the fuming man, his brows furrowed that even backlit as he was the crease in his forehead and his lips downturned into a vicious snarl could be seen. Andrews could hardly believe that man was capable of such ire.   
“Did you truly think you could continue these transgressions undetected? Are you _mad?”_  
He was lost for words, opening and closing his mouth as if he were a fish. It felt as if their souls were abandoning their bodies as he and Rose saw Spicer Lovejoy walking up behind Ismay, comically villainous, an evil smirk on his lips.   
The chairman of White Star Line stomped up to the Master Shipbuilder, blustering and shaking with rage. “You are a married man, for God’s sake! What is Helen going to say when she finds out? And what about Miss DeWitt Bukater, hmm, Mr. Andrews? What do you suppose shall happen to you when Mr. Hockley discovers you’ve been cavorting with his wife-to-be? Good Lord, you may be a genius of architecture but as a man, you are as great a fool as I’ve ever seen.” 

Someone could have reached their hands through her flesh and ripped her heart straight from her breast and slapped her in the face and Rose would have been far less horrified and anguished. _Married! Mr. Andrews married! How can this be? Oh, it couldn’t be!_

“You would truly risk your reputation for a dalliance? And with a girl so young? You’re a fool, Thomas, _a fool!”_

Andrews tried to ground himself by gripping the railing until it pained his hands, but it did nothing. It was as if he had gone mute in the shame flowing from him and he could do nothing but stare at the deck forged by his own hands, too abashed to look at Ismay and preferring death to witnessing the betrayal on Rose’s precious face. 

“You will end this now, this instant. If you have no care for your own reputation, so be it, but I will not let you damage _Titanic’s_ image because you choose to be witless.” 

Without another word spoken, Ismay stomped away like a reprimanded child in a flurry of rage, disappearing beyond the doors of the First-Class ingress. Oh, how Andrews wished he and Rose had walked through them when they had been afforded the opportunity. 

Lovejoy remained, overjoyed at the spectacle as if he were sitting in the theatre watching a moving picture. He crossed his arms in smug satisfaction.  
For once, the bitch of a woman he was forced to endure for the sake of his employment stood, bereft of speech, refusing to meet his eyes, shrinking within herself in such a way that if he did not know her as well as he did he would have figured she was demure in the wake of Andrews’s deceit. She was exactly as a woman should be, instead of obstinate and perfervid as she insisted on being.   
“Come, Miss Rose. I shall take you back to Mr. Hockley and your mother,” his gentle voice fooled none of them, his natural arrogance sitting just underneath the speech like blood beneath veins. 

“No, Lovejoy. I will come back when I’m ready,” she did not look at him, staring at her folded hands before her, quiet as a mouse.   
“Miss Rose, come on. It will do you no good standing out here with him.”  
“I said no! No, Lovejoy, _no!_ I will come when I’m ready, I say!” she exclaimed, stamping her foot.   
The dastardly man was unaffected as he shoved his hands in his pockets and, with a final antagonistic grin, sauntered callously away. 

And so, the two with the raging affair of the heart and bereft forever of one of the flesh, were left in the dissipating fire of the explosion of truth, feeling as if they had just been skinned alive. Rose could not bear to look at him, less from anger and more from her hatred of the idea of this gentle man upset, even if such upset was brought upon himself. 

“You’re married,” she said as a statement instead of a question.   
“Yes,” he croaked.   
“And you kept that from me,” Rose finally looked up, steadfast even as tears collected in her eyes, making them gleam in the light of the deck lanterns, just as they had when they were tiptoeing like thieves to true happiness just hours before.   
“You don’t understand, Rose. There is so much that you do not understand. It is not as simple as all that, you must believe me.”   
“How can I believe anything you say when I just discovered you’re married? And from _Bruce Ismay_ of all people! You’re married and you...you...you were going to kiss me! I know you were!”   
He furrowed his brow. “Yes, Rose, I was. And you mustn’t forget that you are engaged to be married and you were going to let me.” 

She started and recoiled, truth washing over her, no warmer than if she had stripped down to her bloomers and truly had jumped from the side of the ship into the below-freezing ocean beneath them.   
How right he was, _damn_ him.   
They were both as guilty as the other and their hearts throbbed in hatred of circumstance in tandem as they stood, never more divided. Rose almost felt seeking the solace of her unfeeling mother would comfort her more than being in the presence of this man, this man that just as little as a half-hour before she could have dared say she lo— 

“You’re right, Mr. Andrews,” she emphasized his name and he understood, wincing as if he had been stabbed. “I...I wish you a good night.” 

He did not even attempt to call after her, even as he felt the tugging of the blasted string tied around his heart connected to hers. It felt as though it were pulling and pulling, and the animosity brought upon them was fraying it. It would fall apart and when it did, his heart would die.  
His grip on the railing faltered and he fell to sit on the deck, suddenly sweltering in the bitter April night. He did not see her standing in front of one of the windows, watching him with eyes that were, albeit flooded with lifeless tears, filled with love that could only possess her when he was in her view, and that he could only feel when she was on his mind as she was in that moment and had been for the past two days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There you have it, my darlings.  
> What Fabrizio says in Italian is, "And such a beautiful girl to have with us tonight!"  
> To any Italian readers, I'm terribly sorry if it's not 100% correct. 
> 
> Our poor dears, and curse you, Lovejoy!  
> I promise dear Thomas has an explanation for everything! Don't hate him just yet! 
> 
> I'll be back with you in a moment, darlings. 
> 
> All my love,  
> M <3


	6. Of Corsets and Tours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ruth confronts Rose, Rose second-guesses, and Thomas Andrews makes a confession.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here I am again, my darlings!  
> Oh, this chapter is going to be a doozy!  
> As always, I'm not at all satisfied but I hope it proves to live up to your expectations! 
> 
> And thank you, thank you, **thank you** for your comments. Every time you leave me one I get all happy and jittery and smile like a crazy person! It means so much to me that you all read my story and truly enjoy it. There is no greater compliment and I ask for no other pay than that! 
> 
> Please enjoy!

** _Saturday,_ 13 April 1912 **

The light of the morning was bright and the day looked promising at the first waking glance. The ocean was gleaming like a thousand diamonds caught by the most precious light and a gentle nipping breeze dancing around in a fluent waltz, and yet the faces of the man and woman seated in their private promenade were contorted and the tension between them was so thick the lady wanted to take her butter knife and slash through it. Not a single word had been spoken in the near half-hour since they had been seated, and the inharmonious silence was interrupted only by the tapping of Trudy’s heels as she walked to and fro, pouring coffee and serving as needed. 

“Coffee, sir?” She sweetly asked to which Cal shook his head, eyes never moving from the tip of his cup.   
It was the most Rose had seen out of him that entire morning. She dared steal a glance up at him from under her raven eyelashes, biting the inside of her lip. The spoon she was stirring in her coffee ominously stilled on her hand’s own accord, waiting with bated breath for action.   
When her fiancé finally returned her gaze, his eyes were dark, threatening, and Rose thought when they caught the sun and shined like a jewel that it was a strike of lightning in his thundercloud of a being.   
She refused to fear him and lifted the cup daintily to her lips, sipping slowly and averting her eyes, trying to ignore the sizzling of unrest as it could only indicate an approaching impasse. 

“I had hoped you would come to me last night,” his lips tilted in what could only be described as a cheap imitation of a warm and husbandly smile.   
The insinuation of his words was not lost on her and she stiffened, squirming in her chair as she looked to her drink again. “I was tired.” 

_There. Not the whole truth, but certainly not a lie._

Cal hummed. “Your exertions below decks with Andrews were no doubt exhausting.”   
Her shoulders tensed so forcefully she could feel them brush against the bottoms of her ears and she glowered, squeezing the saucer in her fingers until the tips of her thumbs were as white as the foam beating against the ship beneath them. It all made perfect sense now, how Ismay came to know about her and Mr. Andrews, and just why Lovejoy had been so disgustingly smug. _The nerve of him, spying on me like some recalcitrant tot!_

“I see you had that undertaker of a manservant follow me. How typical,” Rose scoffed with a sour and indignant simper, placing her cup back on the table like punctuation to her speech.   
He ignored her daring comment and smiled as if readily expecting her compliance. The lightning struck again, brighter, a pulsing bolt, jutting out like knives to cut her to pieces. “You will never behave like that again, Rose. Do you understand?”   
With absolute confusion and a strange pinch of melancholy, she identified the tightening in her chest as a feeling of disappointment.  
_Why in the_ world _was she disappointed in Caledon Hockley?_ She knew just what he was; what he did and how exactly he did it, what he wanted and to just what lengths he was willing to go to get it. _So why am I disappointed in him?_

_Perhaps I was hoping that for once, just once, someone would be true to me; that if the man who had stolen my heart could betray me then perhaps Cal would finally fall into place and the reason for which there was one for everything would be revealed with startling and unmistakable colors. But no. No, the tragic pattern continues, of me, Rose DeWitt Bukater, never finding a single human upon this cursed earth who does not disappoint me. If Thomas Andrews could disappoint me so greatly that I feel as if I’ve been beaten black and blue, then all hope is lost for me for finding anyone of the sort. It’s just as well that I am bound indestructibly to Cal Hockley._

Rose pursed her lips. “I’m not a foreman in one of your mills that you can command. I’m your fiancée!”   
His attention was caught and all was calm before the volcano angered and erupted. “My fiancée? My fian—my _**fiancée?!”**_  
He stood in fuming glory, standing above her as if in charge of her Holy Judgement, expounding upon her every sin she had ever committed, incredulous that she had the gall to come before the gates of Heaven expecting entry.   
“Yes, you are! And my _wife,”_ with the cursed word he took a careless hand and flipped the table, china and all, with a loud and magnificent shatter. He hovered over her, gripping the arms of the chair tightly as if by doing so he could inflict the pain on her somehow, “in practice if not yet by law, so _you will honor me.”_  
Rose trembled like a leaf in the wind. She had never known herself to be completely, earnestly, bone-chillingly afraid of Cal until that moment.   
“You will honor me the way a wife is required to honor a husband, because I will not be made a fool, Rose. Is this in any way unclear?”   
She jerked her head back and forth. “No.”   
“Good,” his face was placid again, sober; back he was to the veneer of charming Caledon Hockley that no one ever saw but her. It was the very reason why when she screamed at the top of her lungs nobody looked up.  
Of unsound mind was the woman who challenged a gentleman’s integrity and good name.  
“Excuse me.” 

He sauntered from the room and Rose sat, trying to regain her breath, as weak as Cal and her mother wished her to be. She cried out as Trudy ran over, immediately kneeling to the pile of shattered china and spilled coffee.   
“W-We had a little a-accident,” she tried to speak over gasping breaths which did nothing to calm her. ‘It’s alright. It’s alright, Miss Rose.”   
“I’m sorry, Trudy. L-Let me help you,” she reached a single trembling hand to the pile, lifting the rose that had theretofore sat elegantly and innocently in its vase, but was now wilted and torn, collateral damage in a consequence of a dilemma not at all its own. _No wonder I had been named after the flower,_ she mused. _They are as much of a martyr as I am._

Trudy caught her arm and she could immediately feel the love flowing from her palm to her. “It’s _alright,_ Miss.” 

It was only when Trudy spoke those words with as much firmness as her timid nature would allow and kept her loving and soft hand on Rose’s arm that she allowed herself to collapse to the floor, unbridled, and cry. 

* * *

The tightening of her corset, the armor suit which transformed her into the lady she was required to be every day, felt like featherlight kisses compared to the battle waging in her head. Even as Trudy yanked with all her might until the air was forced from her, she did not wince nor cry out or even truly notice, for her mind could not be pulled from the clutches of Thomas Andrews. 

Had she been a good deal younger and still believed in such things, she would have imagined and half-believed his spirit had escaped his being unnoticed and made a home within her mind where her thoughts resided. She would have imagined it tugging on her thoughts like the leash of a dog whenever they longed to wander and crooning with an Irish whisper, _No, Young Rose. You shall never be free of us, if not of body then I shall stay here in your mind forever._   
It would have been just as well if such things were possible, for within the mind of the man himself, beyond barriers over which Rose had no physical reach, he solemnly surmised that should Rose DeWitt Bukater be robbed from his life then he would rather be without a soul altogether. 

So caught up was she in her thoughts of him—Trudy’s iron grip upon her laces the only thing keeping her from breaking into hysterical sobs and burying herself in her bed, damn who might see—that she did not hear her mother open the door and send the maid away. She only cared enough to bring her attention back to her chambers when she felt her pillar of strength melt away as Trudy released her. Her mother seized her corset laces in cold and unforgiving hands and pulled with a ferocity which displayed unmistakably a brutality which could only be allayed and masked as the binding her daughter’s corset without garnering her the reputation of being an abusive parent.   
With her mother as her dresser, she was unable to imagine Mr. Andrews speaking a complete sentence before she drew her bindings once again and Rose was ripped from her reverie with a pinch of her ribs or a crush of her lungs so all that occupied her mind was pain and her lack of breath. For once, she was grateful for her mother’s anger and resentment. 

“Whatever it is that is transpiring between you and the shipbuilder, it ends now. You are not to see that man again. Do you understand me?” With another fierce tug that nearly had Rose flying back and knocking them both over, Ruth raised her voice. _“Rose!_ I forbid it.”  
Her daughter rolled her feisty eyes. “Oh, stop it, Mother. You’ll give yourself a nosebleed.”   
No sooner had the last breathless word slipped from her lips that her mother snatched her by the shoulders and whipped her around with enough force to bring a throbbing pain in her head.   
“This is not a game. Our situation is precarious. You know the money’s gone.” 

How could she forget, when it was exactly that which brought upon the miserable existence that was to become her life? When her lack of the blessing of choosing her own husband and her damnation to a loveless and vicious marriage was the denouement of their family’s fall from grace and riches? How could she forget it when it and its consequences superintended her conduct no matter how vehemently she shoved it away from her and her mind? When it was the only reason she did not kiss Mr. Andrews the night before and was the only thing which kept her from telling him she lo—

“Of course I know it’s gone. You remind me every day!”   
Ruth leaned in closer, lowering her voice to a vicious whisper. “Your father left us nothing but a legacy of bad debts hidden by a good name. That name is the only card we have to play.”   
Rose leaned away from her mother, suffocating on her every word as if they all turned to cloth and were shoved down her throat until breathing was impossible.   
“I don’t understand you. It is a fine match with Hockley. It will ensure our survival.”  
“How can you put this on my shoulders?”   
“Why are you being so selfish?” Ruth cried out, eyes widening, looking at her daughter as if she were an offensive stranger.   
_“I’m_ being selfish?” Rose indignantly snapped. 

Ruth went silent, letting glassy tears coat her eyes. They were tears with whom Rose was well acquainted, and there were many a day in her childhood when her mother would use those same tears to make her feel guilty until she succumbed at her feet. She winced and looked away. 

“Do you want to see me working as a seamstress? Is that what you want?” Ruth’s voice nearly failed her as the glass became thicker and thicker. “To see our fine things sold at auction? Our memories scattered to the wind?”   
She covered her mouth with her hand, trying to ward off sobs of which Rose could not assess the authenticity, turning from her daughter as her body began to tremble. If Rose knew her any less than she did, she would have thought her fragile. Even as her mother composed herself quickly as she always did, as women were expected to do, she could not bear to antagonize her any longer, for her inexorable daughter’s love to her mother overflowed within her.  
“It’s so unfair,” she whispered with a huff. 

Ruth whipped around, the glass still gleaming but the features and body steadfast and resolute once again. “Of course it’s unfair. We’re women. Our choices are never easy.”   
Rose squeezed the bedpost beneath her fingers. “And yet you insist on making my choices impossible. They’re not choices at all anymore.”   
Her mother pursed her lips. “I am doing what is best for our family, for us, since your father failed to do so. I am only trying to make you happy, no matter the cost.”  
She scoffed, anger surging red hot in her once again. “I see. And forbidding me from associating with Mr. Andrews whose only crime was to offer me his friendship is supposed to make me _happy,_ is it?” 

The gap was quickly closed as Ruth stepped ominously towards her. Rose could tell her teeth were clenched behind her closed lips. “He is a married man, Rose. He is a married man with a daughter, and he is at least twenty years older than you are, probably not much younger than I am. And he is _not_ a gentleman, no matter what he may claim. He may have built this ship but he is still Irish from humble beginnings with no claim to aristocracy besides his viscount uncle and his father as a member of the Irish Privy Council. He is _nothing.”_

Rose could not tell what she wanted to do. She wanted to scream, she felt sick enough she nearly wanted to vomit, she wanted to cry until her eyes pained her and her ducts were run dry. She wanted to find Mr. Andrews wherever he was and kiss him until they fainted from lack of air. She wanted to box his ears one hundred times for letting her go on and give her heart to him when his own was already possessed by another.  
_Oh,_ she did not know what to do. 

“He is _not_ nothing, Mother. He _is_ a gentleman, if not by your ridiculous standards of wealth than by my own of conduct. You may disapprove of it all you like, the _world_ may disapprove of it all it likes, but I lo—”  
She caught control of her speech just before an irreversible confession fell from her mouth to Ruth who would be free to do with it what she pleased. 

A gentle laugh escaped her mother’s lips, like that of a sympathetic parent to an injured child.  
It was not a laugh that had ever come from Ruth DeWitt Bukater. 

Her cheeks were grasped in her mother’s frigid hands and no matter how she tried to squirm free Ruth’s grip was tight and unrelenting.   
“You have known him all of three days, Rose. Do you think I’m a fool? Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing?”   
The younger woman’s thin brows furrowed. She remained silent.   
“I know what your game is. I know you would do absolutely anything to rebel against what I expect of you. You do not love Mr. Andrews. I’ll wager you don’t even bear any sort of affection for him. You’ve simply chosen him to latch onto because you know he is the very opposite of what I would want for you.” 

Rose was ready to shout, to claim like an insolent and naive girl that she _did_ bear affection for him, that her mother would _never_ understand. But after a moment, her face softened and her skin went pallid in horror. _Could she be correct?_ Could she have tricked her mind into thinking she was in love with Mr. Andrews simply to spite her mother? No, it couldn’t be. And yet the feeling of fear and disgust with herself would not fade from her chest. Her mother was right; she _must_ be. How stupid she had been, how cold and heartless. And to sweet, gentle Mr. Andrews, of all people! 

She did not know she was weeping until her mother brushed away cold tears with her thumbs. Brought back to reality, she barely registered her pressing a kiss to her cheek, masked as affection, and the satisfied smile on her lips. As pliable as clay in the wake of her distress and disgust and heartsickness, she allowed Ruth to turn her around again and she did not notice, not once, the lack of air, and she delighted in the pain against her bones when it came, wishing her mother would pull harder so she could be hurt so much worse for hurting him. 

* * *

The tour began in the Gymnasium where Mr. Andrews and the instructor, a Mr. McCauley, introduced his contemporary exercise machines. They were all foreign to Rose and she hardly understood a word that was said to her, for she spent most of the time trying desperately to avoid Mr. Andrews’s gaze which she felt on her nearly always.   
_Forget these newfangled contraptions! All you need is a man who you don’t want to be around in a small room with you and you get plenty of exercise avoiding him!_

It was all going splendidly and the ache within all her bones seemed to relax somewhat until Mr. McCauley kindly offered her mother a turn rowing on the stationary rowing machine and she sneered at him, sticking her nose in the air and refusing him, leaving the poor man flustered and without a response. It was then that Rose felt obligated to give an apologetic look to both him and Mr. Andrews.

That was her first mistake. 

When their eyes locked, she was reminded forcefully of just why she dared almost say she loved this man, even if it was a fallacy. He looked down at her like she was his saving grace, like there had been a war of one hundred years and he was finally returning home to her. There was sorrow in his dark eyes, swimming hand and hand through the waves with something she could only describe as adoration. She figured her eyes were the perfect mirror image of his: affection, need, desire, want, all with no other destiny but love, strangled from blossoming into its true form by everything in the world but themselves who fought against it unarmed and outnumbered.

 _No,_ she thought. _Mother was right. Even if I don’t mean to, I’m just using him. He deserves better than that. He deserves the wife that is waiting at home for him back in Ireland. The one who gave him love and a home and a daughter. I will never hold a candle to her and I have no right to try. I do not **deserve** to try, either. _

They were next carted along to the bridge and the chartrooms, and Mr. Andrews was explaining the use of two steering wheels to an uninterested but pious Ruth as the Captain stood nearby, smiling with pride when Harold Bride traipsed over to the group. He cast a repentant glance over all of them before handing a telegram to Captain Smith. 

“Excuse me, sir. Another ice warning. This one’s from the _Baltic,”_ he said with a tinge of direness to his voice.   
When Rose dared look up at Mr. Andrews, she could see him biting the inside of his lip, trying to hide it, and she suddenly felt slightly perturbed.   
“Thank you, Sparks,” Captain Smith replied, barely giving the note a shred of genuine attention. He looked up to see both Rose and Ruth with slightly furrowed brows and pinched lips and he smiled.   
“Oh, not to worry. Quite normal for this time of year. In fact, we’re speeding up! I’ve just ordered the last boilers lit.”   
By their own volition, Rose’s eyes carried themselves again to the man standing to her right, and she noticed the gentle glare and the scowl he was emitting towards the Captain, disapproving and uneasy. 

That was her second mistake. 

No matter what had transpired between them, whatever grievances she bore towards him, she trusted his logic and opinion regarding _Titanic_ even more than the captain’s no matter how experienced he was. She could not help but become uneasy, too. 

He motioned the group towards the door, leading them away as he gave one last glance to Captain Smith, just as Officer Lightoller and Officer Murdoch turned to each other just nearby. 

“Did we ever find those binoculars for the lookouts?” Lightoller asked with a hushed tone.   
“Haven’t seen them since Southampton,” replied Murdoch with a shrug. 

_No binoculars for the lookouts and multiple ice warnings. Those do not seem like a good mix,_ thought Rose. She squeezed the strings of her bag in her hand and noticed with dread that Mr. Andrews was doing the same to his beloved notebook, hollowing and scuffing the leather beneath his fingertips. 

* * *

As the hour of luncheon approached, the group found themselves on the starboard boat deck, just along a row of lifeboats, which had just been explained by Mr. Andrews to a bored Cal and Ruth and a fascinated Rose. She walked quietly along, her mother and her fiancé treading behind them, clearly satisfied that Ruth had shamed her straight from the arms of the Master Shipbuilder as they engaged in idle chatter. 

“Mr. Andrews, forgive me,” a light spark of pleasure erupted just below her heart at seeing the shadow flash across her mother’s face at her addressing him. “I did the sum in my head and with the number of lifeboats times the capacity you mentioned...forgive me, but it seems that there are not enough for everyone aboard.”   
“About half, actually,” he spoke to her for the first time since their exhibition the night before, turning and smiling on her with pride with a shake of his head, wonder evident in his eyes. “Rose, you miss nothing, do you?” 

A gasp was heard just over her shoulder as her mother was doubtlessly scandalized by his use of her Christian name, and she gave him a small smile of appreciation. 

“In fact, I put in these new type davits,” Mr. Andrews turned and looked lovingly on them to the disturbance of everyone but Rose. “which can take an extra row of boats inside this one. But it was thought, by some, that the deck would look too cluttered, so I was overruled.”   
The resentment in the tone of his voice she had never heard for anyone save one person, and she knew within an instant that it was Ismay who had overruled him. _Rotten thing! All headlines and image and no practicality!_

“It’s a waste of deck space as it is on an unsinkable ship,” Cal battered a lifeboat as he passed it with his walking stick, causing his fiancée to roll her eyes.   
“Sleep soundly, Young Rose. I’ve built you a good ship, strong and true. She’s all the lifeboat that you need.” He smiled on her, but the look in his eyes displayed a sense of urgency, a need, a desperation that rendered her frozen before him even as life turned along around them. _I must talk to you._

“Mr. Andrews,” she raised her voice, far louder than was required, but it caught the attention of Cal and her mother just as she had planned. “Tell me more about these davits. I’m very interested.” 

A glint like the shooting star they wished on the previous night flying through his irises and a tilt of his lip told her that he understood. 

“Really, Rose. We must be getting on,” Ruth said, unabashedly annoyed and impatient.   
_“Really, Mother,”_ she mimicked her tone like an insolent child. “I want to hear more about the davits! You don’t have to stay. We will catch up to you.”   
“Rose, this is _unseemly!”_ She snarled, taking a few steps toward her.   
She rolled her eyes. “Mother, we’re out in the open! There are people fore and aft! I promise you, my virtue will still be intact when he is done explaining them to me!”   
She did not miss his chuckle as they both watched Ruth pale and nearly fall over at her daughter’s brazenness, bereft of words until Cal walked over and took her arm.   
“We will meet you in the Engine Room. Don’t be long, Rose. I have things to do, you know.”   
They walked off and Rose raised her voice again, “So, Mr. Andrews. The davits…”   
“Yes, Rose, well, if you look just here you’ll see…”   
They both dared glance and the two offenders, the human barriers forcing their way between them, were far out of earshot. He wasted no time pulling her between the lifeboats, pressed between him and the gunwale, buried from the real world as she so often was in his presence. Already she felt herself losing her grip on her resolve like it was ice melting through her fingers.

“Mr. Andrews, surely you know how ridiculous this is,” she whispered.   
“Be that as it may, I could not go another minute without you knowing the full truth, Rose. At least grant me that,” he entreated her, daring to grasp her forearms in the ghost of a touch.  
She did nothing but blink, looking down between them and ignoring the burning of her heart, feeling it enliven once again, and waited. 

“I’m sorry, Rose, that I didn’t tell you I was married. But there is more to it than that, I promise you.”  
“How could you keep something like that from me? How could you when all the while you knew that we were—that I was—” tears began to well in her eyes and her voice failed her.   
“It was foolish of me, I know. It was foolish and selfish and reprehensible of me and I am so sorry, Rose. But there is more to it than that.”   
“Then tell me. Tell me now of your own accord before someone else gets the chance.” 

He leaned towards her, closer than they had ever been. It was intimate and mixing with the whipping bitter winds like oil and water was the heat of their unkempt desire, making them both lightheaded from the contrast. 

“Ever since I was commissioned to build _Titanic,_ my marriage has faltered. My wife, she...she never understood my passion for architecture or shipbuilding. She knew who she was marrying, what she was marrying, but I suppose she thought she could change me into whatever she wanted me to be. She thought my dedication to _Titanic_ was absurd and never failed to tell me so. Even after seeing her, my dream made into reality, she disparaged her and me and refused to come with me on this voyage. She refused to condone the thing that she hated so much and could not change in me.   
“I’ve tried, Rose. I’ve tried to be the husband she wanted, for there was a time when I loved her so much it blinded me. I bought her what she wanted, I cherished her in all the ways I knew how, I gave her a child. I gave her Elba and it still wasn’t enough. How could I ever have succeeded when she hated in me the one thing that is most true, the one thing I have within myself that is my own and nobody else’s? I was doomed to fail her, Rose. I do not blame her for wanting me to be different from what I am and I despaired in not being able to change, but the fact remains that I was doomed to fail her. She and I were doomed to fail.”  
He spoke desperately as if pleading himself to a court where he was charged with high treason. His grasp upon her arms became tighter but she did not care. Her heart, her mind, her soul sang nothing but the melody of Thomas Andrews, and should he have delved his fingers until they were beneath her skin, she would have rejoiced. 

“Word has spread of my failure. The entirety of the First Class looks at me as if I’m deformed or degenerate because I’m a man incapable of pleasing his wife. I dreaded the moment you would look at me just the same, but that was before I knew the real you, Rose. Surely you know by now that I am not a forward man, and yet I’ve known you for three days and I haven’t any trouble telling you that I feel as if I’ve known you my entire life, that you know my mind and I know yours. She doesn’t understand me, _they_ don’t understand me, but you do, Rose. Don’t you see? You understand me, Rose, and I understand you.”

Rose could not speak. She had forgotten how and was robbed of any coherent thought that could form words had she been capable. No one had ever been so candid with her, no one had truly confessed feelings that were not hidden behind flowery and circumspect speeches that did nothing to excite her heart. Mr. Andrews—shy, modest and reserved, _ingenious_ Thomas Andrews—had just laid his heart, disassembled and bare, in her palms willingly with more trust than she had ever seen in anyone before.  
He was unbound from the suppression and illiberality of fashionable society. He was divested of embellishments and was pure human while everyone around them was adorned like royalty with _de minimis_ baubles and ideas. He was _real._  
Her mind could not be shunned from its shouting from the peak of the mountain of her hopes that everything she had been made to endure was all on the weary path to him. It believed he was her liberator, her rescuer from a life she could not bear to live. 

And yet, her mind lied to her. It wanted to believe a more ideal version of herself rested just beyond the spoiled brat on the surface who was blasé to life no matter how much she hated such a quality in herself. _You do not love Mr. Andrews. I’ll wager you don’t even bear any sort of affection for him. You’ve simply chosen him to latch onto because you know he is the very opposite of what I would want for you._

There was too much of her mother in her to truly love him for what he was and what he offered to her, but there was enough of Rose in her to want to save him from her. 

“Mr. Andrews…” she croaked, letting the tears finally fall down her soiled cheeks. “This cannot be. This can never be. You...You must have misinterpreted all of this rather dreadfully.”   
His eyebrows fluttered together for a brief moment, the brightness of his eyes falling like waterlogged clothes in the rain. Rose could nearly hear the crack of his heart as she held in her evil hands the weapon by which it shattered to pieces.

“No, Rose. I won’t let you pretend. Everyone else might overlook how you feel, but I will look up in the room when you’re screaming at the top of your lungs. I hear you. You cannot lie to me. None of this is a coincidence. I don’t know exactly what these past three days mean, but they mean _something,_ Rose.”   
“No. They mean nothing. Nothing has occurred here besides two people enjoying each other’s polite company.”

He frowned, leaning away from her but his grip remaining tight on her arms. 

“Don’t attempt to tell me, Rose, that if I had kissed you last night you would have pushed me away.”  
“Of course I wouldn’t have. But that’s only because we’ve been in a dream, Mr. Andrews. A wonderful, wonderful dream that I’ve loved being in, but I must wake up now. We both must. I have a fiancé whom I love very much and I’ll be married when we reach America. And you, you must return to your wife and daughter. We’ll never see each other again once we reach New York so there’s no sense in prolonging this. Please, let us just get back to the tour. And for both of our sakes, after it’s over, please leave me alone.” 

Half of her wanted him to refuse her rejection, to not take no as an answer and seize her away from the choice to which she was confining herself. But the bigger half, the more important half, was glad of what she had done. She had freed him from falling in love with her. She had freed him from being disappointed in her when he inevitably realized that she was truly unworthy of him. She had done the right thing. She was _certain_ of it. 

After a long silence, after he had drunk in her words like a foul liquor that was forced down his throat, he caressed his fingers down her arm to her gloved hand and raised it to his lips in a kiss. With her words, she had cornered him and held a gun to his head, teased him with death, and the kiss was his surrender. 

_If I made the right decision, why does it feel like my heart is bruised beyond repair and cursed with a terminal misery?_

The Engine Room was reached and Rose was glad to find that her mother and fiancé, for once, kept their churlishness to a minimum, for she was certain neither she nor Mr. Andrews would have been able to bear it.  
Was it God showing some mercy upon their suffering souls, or was the anguish flowing like shattered glass within their veins so evident that even the two most coldhearted people she knew were rendered sympathetic? 

The tour ended with the bugle for luncheon and Rose marveled at how Mr. Andrews hid his pain beneath the surface and displayed his kindness even to the two who had played such a large hand in the ruin of whatever it was they had. As the group separated to dress, with a thudding heart, she dared look up at him in amazement. When she did, the tears pooling beneath his pupils glistened in the noon sunlight with a poignant beauty. Thinking himself alone, he squeezed his eyes shut, the tears escaping and coursing down his beautiful face and beyond. Grief stripped him of his strength and he fell against the gunwale, gripping it with hands like iron vices. His shoulders began to shake with sobs to which only the sea and his beloved _Titanic_ bore witness, and even as tears of her own welled up within her, still she stood and watched him. 

That was her third mistake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it, my darlings. 
> 
> Our poor dears!
> 
> I shall be back with you in a moment, dears. I couldn't _possibly_ leave you hanging now when all this is unresolved! 
> 
> Until then, my dearest readers, I look so forward to your comments. They keep me going!
> 
> -m <3


	7. Of Reminiscence and Imaginings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rose DeWitt Bukater remembers the first time she ever heard of Thomas Andrews, and imagines how her life would go if she were free to be who she wanted to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my sweet darlings! 
> 
> Forgive the long delay in updating! I was at the beach (or "down the shore" as you say here in New Jersey) for a much-needed vacation. But I spent much time sitting in the sand and writing this chapter in my notebook! 
> 
> Forgive me in advance, not much happens in this chapter. It's really just a big ol' info dump and a filler chapter. But the next chapter will be a doozy, I promise! 
> 
> Please enjoy, darlings, and thank you from the bottom of my heart for over 260 hits!

** _Saturday,_ 13 April 1912 **

When Cal proposed to Rose, she had still held a stuffed bear at night while she slept. 

She had long known of her mother’s ploy to marry her off, and hence adulthood had been thrust upon her so violently she had not the time nor the will to part with all of her childhood self in one fell swoop.   
And so, the raggedy bear, far past his prime, her bosom friend through ordeals neither her mother nor her fiancé could ever understand, lay in her bed in England, always ready to comfort her no matter what tormented her mind. And by the time Cal had asked for her hand, more tormented her mind than either of them could withstand with any modicum of strength.   
Her mother admonished her every time she caught sight of it peeking over the mountain range of her counterpane, and told her in a hissing, scandalized whisper how such a habit could discourage Cal from wanting to marry her and ruin everything.   
And yet Rose kept him and, as she walked along the promenade, the noon sun gleaming down on her and the empty decks with sympathetic rays, the only thing which brought her comfort was the knowledge that that very bear lay hidden from prying eyes beneath silken frocks at the bottom of her trunk. It was the only thing that kept her sobs at bay and protected the tact of her internally tattering reputation, restraining the display of her heartache to a few solemn tears dripping down her cheeks. 

_Not all of me is gone yet. All of me will be gone when I am forced to marry Cal, but not yet. Not while I’m still here. Not when_ he _is somewhere around that I can still find him._

* * *

As she strolled, she remembered being in England and waking each morning with her bear in the crook of her arm.   
And even more so she remembered at breakfast reading the name “Thomas Andrews” and the name of his creation in so many newspapers and letters and columns for so many consecutive days she nearly retched when her mother and fiancé returned to their hotel one morning, smiling and flaunting First-Class tickets for the _RMS Titanic’s_ maiden voyage, waving them before her face like a rattle to a fussing infant.   
Had she been but a day younger of mind, she would have crossed her arms and set her jaw and set alight that blazing emerald in her eyes until her mother huffed and reprimanded her for her childish reaction and called her a brat, for Rose wanted absolutely nothing to do with Thomas Andrews nor _Titanic_ nor what the pair of them, unified in nascence and emergent history, would bring to her own life, no matter if their harm was unintended.   
She wanted to hate them with a vehemence she did not possess. But even when he was strolling the decks on the first day of the journey, the ship having hardly passed the docks, the long resting spine of his black notebook finally cracked once again and its pages ready and hungry for his think pieces and appraisals, an awed smile painted across his lips, she could not. She could not hate him even when, sauntering idly, he passed by them and smiled at Cal who excitedly and clumsily greeted him and introduced him like an old friend to his fiancée and future mother-in-law as if he had a right to do so, and he grinned at them, ignorant of what he had caused, and expressed his pleasure at meeting them and engaged in small talk when he could have walked on without a single solecism to his name, acclaimed and demanded man as he was. Nor could she when, had she cared enough about him or about anything that was not the doom she was soon to face to do so, she would have noticed the twinkle in his midnight eyes as he looked on her that first-ever time, that would have told anyone more experienced in the art of reading the emotions of man that he thought she was the most beautiful woman who had ever graced him and that her spirit flowed with unnatural hands and threaded itself within his mind with the first ocean blue gaze which met his own. 

No, it was not until she sat across from him at luncheon the next day with the skinning wound of his modesty and humbleness fresh on her, not until she realized just how difficult it was to hate him, that she decided she hated him, indeed. 

After all, if she could pride herself on anything that could truly be her own, it was a success at achieving things that, in the suffocated and suffocating world in which she was chained, were absolutely impossible. 

She hated him then and she continued to hate him even when he laughed at her jab at Ismay to which any other man would have been instantly repulsed and mentally docketed her with a select shadowed few who were deemed unworthy of his attention or acknowledgment. She hated him still, even when he sought her out in a moment when she felt there was not a single kindred soul on _Titanic,_ in the entire world which could understand her with even a single iota of what she so desperately needed, and commended her on her wit. 

Thomas Andrews was the single entity, person or otherwise, who threatened her little world in which she was content with her suffering, where she was used to sharp stabs of needles of what was truly a gentle breeze of wind, as one becomes used to a new pair of slippers, and for that, she hated him more than anything she had ever known in all her days. 

She recalled afternoon tea on the second day of the voyage after her episode at luncheon and remembered her mother hissing like a snake with a placid face and straight back to the Countess of Rothes how earlier that day the improper and queer Thomas Andrews had answered a summons from some Second-Class family who was having trouble with their washroom sink and had spent four hours repairing it with his own hand, refusing the assistance of the ship’s plumber. Rose had not forgotten it, not even in the depths of the partisan negation that so often occurred when one was angry at another.   
She had not forgotten just hours later when she had been taking a turn about the deck before dinner, her mind already simmering with the desperation from which he would inevitably save her, seeing him girdled by two raging women in White Star Line uniforms. They were stewardesses, engaged in an acrimonious spat, the details about which Rose did not care enough to remember.   
He had stood between them, ever patient, raising and lowering his hands, trying to calm them, and spoke to them in that smooth, titillating Irish brogue that was enough to soothe even the most unfeeling, bloodthirsty beast. He allowed them to voice their respective sides, keeping one quiet as the other opined in heated tones, giving kind and near-silent reprimands when insults spilled from their lips. And with his own words, he built a bridge of understanding and compromise which, after many tiring minutes, the effect of which Rose felt even as a mere bystander, the two girls eventually crossed and upon which shook proverbial hands. 

Even after they had walked off and he had given a great sigh of exhaustion, wiping his perspiring forehead with his stark white handkerchief, she continued to watch him, finding him more fascinating than even the most celebrated French opera which she had so vehemently begged her mother to see back in Paris. 

She remembered feeling her shoulders aching from her sudden wince of anticipation as a raggedly dressed steerage passenger approached him in the aftermath of his whirlwind, turning and pointing in the direction of the stern, talking nervously about a shade of paint in the Third-Class General Room being too dark. She expected him to roll his eyes, to scoff with incredulous snobbery, to laugh as he stalked away as one would brush off a child as Rose’s mother would do and had done so many times before.   
But instead, his eyes widened, alight with interest, and he reached into his inner pocket and replaced his handkerchief and procured his dear notebook. He began to scribble with a quick passion, nodding his head and responding to the passenger’s concerns and ideas as if he were speaking to a Harland and Wolff executive. After writing for some minutes, conversing and debating over the paint and asking the man’s opinion on other matters which he was less than obligated to do, Mr. Andrews gave him a genuine friendly pat on the shoulder and sauntered on. He reviewed his notes with true reminiscent care as he did, his smile restored, and the passenger looked over his shoulder in astonishment, his faith and hope in a more equal and integrated human race restored and all thanks to Thomas Andrews, the very top tier of elite royalty.   
She had not forgotten any of it. 

All her mother had ever wanted was for Rose to become an adult long before it was due, and as she continued to walk, her tears long since dried in shiny, transparent lines tight on her skin, she realized that she had.   
She _had_ become an adult; she had grown into a mind that thought for itself, free from the vices of the opinions and directions of others. She _had_ become what her mother wanted her to become, and yet ladyhood told her in no uncertain terms that she did not want Cal, she did not want riches and luxury and to be the elite at the throne atop everyone else, especially if she had to be forced into unhappiness and misery for the possession of them.   
No, all adult Rose wanted was freedom, and her ticket to such and companion in it was all tied together and found in him. 

_Damn_ that he was married, _damn_ that he was old enough to be her father, _damn_ that he was a self-made man of humble beginnings. She wanted him; him, and everything having him entailed, come what may. She wanted Thomas Andrews as she had never wanted anything—person, place, or thing—in her entire life. 

He was no longer to her the fabled figure whose name, meaningless in its incessant repetition, invaded the narratives of her morning newspapers like a rip in the page. He was no longer the peculiar fellow who meandered around his ship, mindless of those around him as he constantly bumped into people with a brisk apology and a tilt of his hat, inscribing notes in the notebook which served as the only barrier between him and the rest of reality. No, now he was all she had ever wanted and all she would ever want again. 

The rest of the First-Class did not understand why he did not just close the book, for if he did, he would be just like the rest of them and free from their perturbed stares and whispers, even if he was a parvenue. 

After all, it was custom that the aristocrats should not care about one thing enough to be as distracted as he was. 

But he did not close it, for _Titanic_ was the only reality in which he was interested, and that little black book was like the enchanted doorway to the land of his dreams. And yet, even though he inadvertently betrayed everything she had been taught to know and believe, Rose could not think of him or look down at him and his anomalousness with the snobbish hauteur she so often forced within herself, but instead found she loved it. She loved how different he was, how he had hardly a care whether his peers minded or not, and how he somehow found the capacity within himself, with enough talent and good nature, to acquire their good opinions despite it all. He was a walking oxymoron and flowing in liquid gold between the walls of fascination and confusion was love in the corner of her busy heart reserved especially for him, and she could no longer ignore it.   
She did not want to ignore it, either, for it was the single feeling within her entire self uninfluenced by whims or dreams or rebellion; these, her feelings for Thomas Andrews—the celebrity to her obscurity, genius to her shielded brain, grown man to her foolish girl—was the only thing that was not conjured into independent existence by the false idea that it was original in her head, that it was brought from deep within her where what she truly wanted and who she truly was resided. No, those were all influenced; whether it was resentment of Cal or a long-needed rebellion against her mother, everything she wanted that directly challenged the ways of the world in which she was ensconced were swayed by something. 

But not this; she was falling in love with Thomas Andrews, humble Irishman, director of the Drafting Department at Harland and Wolff in Belfast, Ireland, chief naval architect of the _RMS Titanic,_ and it was so novel and vernal in its freedom from selfishness that with the thought of it came a new breath of cool, fresh air to her lungs. It was as if her true self was a map and she was slowly revealing it after all these blind years, and the recognition of her unbiased love for Mr. Andrews was the piece that made acquaintance with her eyes when the spotlight of discovery shone directly on her neglected heart. 

But her mother could not have been wrong about her. 

If Rose could give Ruth DeWitt Bukater credit for anything, it would be that despite their difference in inclination and priority, she knew her daughter like the back of her hand, and perhaps, Rose feared, she knew her better than she knew herself. The sharpness of the dagger to her heart when her mother told her with a confident sneer that she did not love Mr. Andrews nor care for him could not have been simply of her mother’s own design, her own handpicked knife to damage her daughter just enough that she could be once again molded into submission.   
No, Rose had taken that weapon and sharpened it herself and impaled herself on it. 

Her mother could not have been wrong. 

But yet Rose could so clearly see herself and Mr. Andrews, unashamedly arm in arm as they departed his beloved _Titanic_ together, smiles everlasting; she could see them marrying in a quaint little church in Ireland with a few rushed witnesses, the figureheads of their disobedience to custom. She could see them in a humble little cottage in Belfast or County Down, her stomach swollen with their child, the floor and desk of his study worn with use as he slaved over the blueprints for his next ingenious creation that was to grace the world, only ever pausing to dine with her and kiss her and make love to her and sleep beside her.   
Rose could see in her head their litter of children, their lives together, and in her vision, so close to being tangible she could almost touch his hand and kiss his lips as she so craved to do beyond it, she gave not a single thought to Ruth or Cal or any of the rest of them.   
Her vision was noble and unthinking of what she was betraying. It was full of love, and who felt betrayed by it and who did not, who supported them or wished their love to crash and burn was inconsequential; they did not care, for one another was their only vital source of contentment. 

So how could Ruth be correct about Rose? 

How could she be correct when the imagining of her life with Mr. Andrews was the most altruistic thing she had ever done even if its circumstances were the fence to their manor, laced and choked with the poisonous vines of selfishness?   
It was an oxymoron, she realized, just as he was, and for that, she trusted it with all of her being. 

But Ruth could not have been wrong about her. She never had been, and just because Rose wanted her to be so terribly she could taste the bitterness of it on her tongue, why should that change now? After all, the world had never been so kindly ironic and easy for her before and she hardly suspected it would attempt to rectify its unkindness now.   
No, her mother could not have been incorrect. 

* * *

Her walking brought her to just where they had had their conversation hours earlier. The lifeboats stared at her with unfeeling, judgmental eyes, and as they rocked in the wind with a gentle metallic creak, they seemed to say to her, _“We saw what you did! We saw what you did! We know how stupid you are!”_  
She gave a great sigh, her corset gnawing at her skin like a rabid dog, and she was resigned to turn and run to an unknown destination, needing to be free of the scene of her own emotional sort of homicide, when she caught a sound among the taunting of the boats which twirled and twisted about her ears with the twinge of an Irish brogue. 

_It's him,_ damn _him!_ If only the man was content with working in the solitude of his own stateroom, what pains from which she would have been freed!   
Or, perhaps, he was not to blame; perhaps it was God himself tittering on her from above in a taunting manner. 

_Well, it’s no matter, God. I shall pay for my stupidity soon enough, and I daresay it shall be a lifelong debt paid only with a lifelong sacrifice. So why must you do this to me now?_

He stood with Captain Smith, the conversation unintelligible to her from her distance, the words shattered like glass on their path to her by the whipping April winds. She heard a few of them; “ice,” and “boilers,” and “warning,” and “bad idea,” and yet she could not pay attention. Rose could only watch the raising of his eyebrow, the pulling of smooth, alabaster skin upon his cheeks as he spoke, the wetting of his lips as his tongue darted out in between sentences. He spoke heatedly, she could tell, for his voice was loud even if she could not understand it, and sweat began to bead at his temples even as the temperature for the afternoon was closing in at just about fifteen degrees above freezing. It was a passion that was left undisplayed in everyone around her, the damned poised couples who tiptoed around her even as she stood there watching him, and her love grew within her chest. _Damn_ him! 

Had Rose been paying attention and her thoughts loosened their grip, she would have noticed him catching sight of her, all aglow in dulled fiery reds in the noon sun. His dark eyes watched her, memorizing every breath that expanded her dress to a renewed glisten of silk, trying to remind himself that she was somehow real. The fires of her burned him within, the desire and the sadness and the confusion all pulsing in tandem in their searing hot flames.   
How this had happened, he was sure he would never know; how he had fallen so quickly for a seventeen-year-old girl whose father he had been aware of but not known, how two alike spirits, so rare in the atmosphere of their compatriots, so different in physical circumstance but alike in internal propensity, had found themselves intertwining and embracing on the little floating universe of his own design. It all seemed so very impossible. _And yet..._

He had never been a forward man, and he had told her so. 

He had been so stumbling and nervous when he asked for Helen’s hand that he sent her a letter of apology the evening after her acceptance for startling her so terribly.   
And yet, he had stood there just hours previous, nerves escaping him like the steam from _Titanic’s_ copper funnels, and all but proposed to Rose! And what was he planning to do had she accepted his proposal, whatever it presupposed? Divorce Helen? embroil the pair of them in an inescapable scandal? leave her a widow far too early when he died long before she?  
He did not know just what he would have done; and yet even with these thoughts and so many others which raged in his naturally but suppressed pessimistic mind, all was worth it to him if at the end of it all he could have Rose DeWitt Bukater. 

But it could never be. She had denied him and with good reason. He had to forget her. He had to try, for _Titanic_ was only a temporary reality, and the more permanent one lay just beyond her bow, almost visible now on the horizon, and it was coming to sneak its preternatural tendrils around him and snatch him, the most unwilling prisoner. 

They were frozen. All that stood between them was the Captain before Mr. Andrews and the feet of empty distance beyond him, flanked by well-to-do couples who were unknowing chaperones in their brawl of unkempt, secretive desire. They thought all these thoughts and they were displayed like a nickelodeon in their eyes, flashing in clarity to the other even from such a distance, and they were damned if they were going to try and pretend that they did not understand. 

_He’s the only one who can understand me._

_She’s the only one who can understand me._

Rose watched Mr. Andrews’s respectful eyes upon her even when his motion picture of desperate and desirous thought ended in a burst of flames. Hers was just in the middle, reaching the climax of running to his arms and throwing caution to the wind, but she could not let him see it. She would not.   
And as he continued to watch her, the Captain’s words falling on unhearing ears, his unattainable angel, the queen of his oceanic universe turned on an elegant foot and fled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it, my darlings. 
> 
> I'm terribly sorry if it's disappointing, but I included some details here that I really should have had in the beginning chapters or even a prologue, but I wasn't going to plug them in and make you go on a treasure hunt for them! And this is fanfiction, after all, so there are no rules! <3 
> 
> I'll be back with you in a moment, angels. The next chapter is on its way and it's going to be a good one! 
> 
> Until then, and with all my love in the world, 
> 
> -m <3


	8. Of Doubts and Culminations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rose doubts what she knows, but Jack and Mr. Andrews are there to remind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am back, my darlings, and far ahead of schedule! I just couldn't wait to get the next part out because I felt I cheated you a bit with the last one. 
> 
> I'm so very excited for you to read this one! 
> 
> And as I publish this, we're ten views away from 300! Oh my goodness! My heart is going to burst, thank you so much, my loves.
> 
> Also, I've known for some time how I'm going to end this story, and I haven't had a clear outline of a story in a very long time, so know this one is very important to me and I love writing it for all of you. I love seeing your guesses! There is absolutely no greater joy for me than seeing that you enjoy our story. 
> 
> And yes, it's _our_ story, because it's your feedback and your praises and criticisms which keep me writing it. 
> 
> Please enjoy, my darlings!

** _Saturday,_ 13 April 1912 **

On any other day, the mesmeric First-Class Lounge, decorated stunningly in Louis XV Style, would have captured Rose’s mind and heart until she was spellbound, unaware of the world spinning about her as she drank in the ethereal beauty of it all. On any other day, she would have meandered about the room and scrutinized every detail in its mahoganies and fine golds and powdered blues with infatuated eyes until her mother had to yank her away by her lace-bedecked arm.   
But instead, on this day, her mind was weighed with the bitter and frigid tendrils of regret sneaking its way around her consciousness. Her thoughts were halted and sprinkled with poison until all she could see and hear in the shadow of her mind were the “what-ifs” of the situation in which she had found herself inextricably entangled. 

_What if_ she had accepted Mr. Andrews in his proposal, whatever it was? _What if_ she had kissed him in the Third-Class General Room or on the promenade deck? _What if_ Caledon Hockley ceased to exist and she had bumped into a kind Irishman in the middle of London or in quaint little Southampton and they had fallen for each other as they had on _Titanic,_ and it was _his_ ring she wore on his finger, _his_ name she was to take in a few days’ time, the bridesmaids’ dresses of _their_ wedding that her mother was gossiping about to the Countess of Rothes and Lady Duff-Gordon before her? 

She could not bear the thought and yet there it was and there it remained, as steadfast and definite and concrete as one of New York City’s skyscrapers. She could not escape it, just as she could not escape what awaited her on the other side of the ocean, just as she could not escape the rest of her life which had been stripped of the title of being her own. It was not her life that she was to live when dry land rested beneath her feet; she was the damsel of the novel, and her mother and Cal were the authors with their pens leaking ink onto the page, dictating her every move and bringing to her unspeakable misfortunes and travails from which she had no refuge.  
Mr. Andrews was the only true refuge she had known in her seventeen years, and she would lose him in less than one-hundred hours, never to see him again. She was reminded unmistakably of Bruce Ismay, vaunting about _Titanic’s_ size, just as the world was going to do to her in a matter of days. It would exult in her grandness, her multitude of lands and oceans, her superfluity of people who called her their home, and separate Rose and Mr. Andrews until they were so deep within their respective lands and worlds that any hope of reunion was done away with. And all the while they would be walking the same Earth, blocking their eyes from the same blinding sun, wishing and reminiscing on the same moon and stars, reminded of one another whenever one shot across the sky, and yet no wish would be powerful enough to bring them together again. 

She could bear so much, had borne so much in her short life, but the thought of living the rest of it without Mr. Andrews somewhere in it was one she could not bear, not with even a surplus of strength and willpower. And as she sat there in that beautiful room, the one he has forged with his own brain and overseen with his adoring eyes, her tea growing cold, Rose took to staring at the plate of teacakes and wafers in the middle of the table, for if she looked at her mother or her intimates or the rest of her companions in the First-Class world, she would have wept and caterwauled until her state of mind was brought into serious question.

She stared at the plate of baked goods until despondency had her feeling violently ill and the sight of food nearly had her retching. She let her eyes drag across the floor to another table just ahead and to the left of her, and saw a woman and young girl, no older than four, seated with the teacups and a vase of wildflowers sat in front of them. As the waiter refilled their cups, the mother reached to the girl, pressing an elegantly gloved hand to her back and the child shot up until she sat straight as a lamppost, keeping her chin up and her hands folded upon her lap. While the woman fiddled with her, straightening her back, wrenching her shoulders to correct her posture, positioning her hands, the little girl flicked her eyes from the table to her mother every few seconds, surveying her expression, desperate for her approval and eager to please. The woman pointed to the napkin upon the table and the girl, with dainty, white-adorned hands, pinkies lifted, took it and folded it upon her small lap, smoothing it down with her little fingers until it was as smooth as glass. 

Rose suddenly was bereft of breath. Watching this young girl, suppressed of childish impulse and impropriety, desperate to oblige her mother, was like being taken back in time and bearing witness to herself at that same age. Ever since she was little, all she had wanted to do was please her mother, all she wanted was for her mother to be proud of her and instead of speaking to her friends about the scandals of Philadelphia life, to begin the conversation with, _“Oh, you’ll never guess what Rose did today,”_ or, _“My, was I lucky to be blessed with such a good daughter as Rose,”_ or, _“I’ve never known a girl to act so naturally a lady as my little Rose.”_  
And yet, all she did, all of herself she shoved away with a forced and bitter distaste, her mother’s gossip always began with who-had-an-affair-with-who and who-saw-who and who-was-caught-doing-what. Never once did she hear her name brought up willingly in the conversations on which she used to eavesdrop like they were the most delightful story in the world, waiting for a happy ending that never came. 

Nothing she could ever do would ever please Ruth DeWitt Bukater, not even marrying Caledon Hockley. It was what her mother wanted of her now, but there would always be something with which to fault her; she did not gossip demurely as a new wife should, her soirées were too vulgar, her baby’s name was too modern and she held it wrong. She was trapped on an endless carousel of conciliation and she could do absolutely nothing but fall victim to it.   
Rose loved her mother, she always would, no matter her shortcomings, but as the adult she had implored her to become and with the adult mind which came with it, she realized she was fighting an unconquerable battle. 

And so, with this thought fresh in her mind, she thought of Cal.   
Rose had always seen people in her mind alongside the things of which they reminded her, and when she summoned her fiancé to the forefront of her mind, all she saw were metal chains and tears. She saw him with a great mantelletta, worn by him as the figurehead of all that was expected of her, a scepter in his violent hand as he tyrannically dictated her every act. 

But then she turned her mind to the man she swore she would not think of for the rest of the day, at least, and for the rest of the voyage hence. Rose saw with little effort the smiling brown eyes, ardent and adoring as they looked only on her. She could not see him in a royal mantle of tyranny; rather she could see him shoving it off his shoulders, disgusted at it and at the very idea. She saw him reaching with gentle hands, those genius hands which she loved so much, for her as he reached his fingers to her heart and intertwined them together, an unbreakable knot which she would wear with pride for the rest of her days. 

Cal was a king, bathing in riches and superiority, and Mr. Andrews was her equal in peasantry, character reigning true over wealth, content in having her as what she was, not what he wanted her to become and saw himself clever enough to mold her to be.

And that was the moment it all became so apparent to her, like a slap to the face or the cut of one thousand knives to her flesh, punishing her for her foolishness. Her mother was forever impaired to her daughter, sitting idly and comfortably in her half-blindness, seeing her daughter as incomplete, marching down the path of furtherance, and set her sights on what she wished her daughter to become.   
She did not see the true Rose; she did not see her true thoughts and feelings, beliefs and opinions, affections and resentments. She did not see her love for Mr. Andrews and she, so immersed in her phantasm, had tricked Rose into living it and believing it with her. 

_You do not love Mr. Andrews._

Oh, but she did! _She did!_

She loved him more than she figured her little young heart could handle and soon it would burst in a color show of golds and reds, painting her entire body, inside and out, with the palpable glory of her devotion to him. 

Rose DeWitt Bukater loved Thomas Andrews so violently, so ardently that she would never let anyone, mother or fiancé, influential elite or celebrity or hero, impugn it in themselves or her ever again. 

The white tablecloth was clenched in her fingers as her heart began to pound beneath her aching ribs. All of the veins in her body sang as her blood sparkled and glimmered and she felt suddenly reborn, free of chains and woes. She wanted to jump from the table and run to him, she wanted to gather all two thousand-two hundred souls aboard the _RMS Titanic_ onto her decks just to kiss him in front of them and hold him to the sounds of their scandalized gasps and exclamations. 

But were his affections the same, she wondered. The thought barreled down on her like one of the Rolls-Royces brought aboard with one of _Titanic’s_ electric cranes.   
Rose knew him to feel something for her, as it was made all too clear that morning; but did he love her as she did him, enough to hold on with strong arms of hope that were undeterred by even the most seemingly impossible obstruction? She suddenly doubted it, but she knew she would never know for sure if she did not try. 

And so, she laced a single milky white finger around the ear of her teacup and feigned a knock of her elbow to the table, forceful enough to slam the cutlery against it to the jolting of the women present around her, and in an instant, the lukewarm tea was spilled into her lap. 

“Oh, look what I’ve done,” she exclaimed, throwing her hands up and looking to the damp mottle on her skirts.   
Ruth rolled her eyes and turned to the ladies, “I do apologize. My daughter’s head has not been at this table, nor on this ship this entire day!” 

The words “my daughter” were spoken with considerable venom, but Rose was far past caring as she swiftly rose and sped from the Lounge.   
She made her way into the Reception Room, catching a young steward who could not have been much older than she. “Excuse me, do you know where I can find Mr. Andrews?”  
The boy pointed out the doors. “I just saw him on the decks, madam, headed aft.” 

Rose thanked him, feeling none the wiser as she knew all too well the man’s tendency to wander in every direction that it would make anyone else lightheaded.  
As she stepped into the whipping sea winds, grown colder with the tiring sun, she crossed her arms around herself, undeterred. She knew not where to look and surveyed each man who passed her, but was unsuccessful in finding the one man she sought.   
Suddenly, enraptured in discovering if the object in a passing man’s hand was a particular black notebook or simply a cigarette case, she collided with a hard shoulder and was sent stumbling backward with a quiet cry. 

“Whoa! Sorry, there, Rose!” The voice was American and as rough but warm hands seized her by the waist, she knew just who it was.   
“Jack! No, _I’m_ sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was going. Forgive me,” she replied, blushing and looking away.   
“Hey, no harm done,” he shrugged, shoving his hands into his pockets. “But you look like you’re in a hurry and you look kinda upset. What’s goin’ on?” 

Rose hesitated for a brief moment. She wondered over telling Jack the truth of her quest, for, after all, he had suspected it before it was clear to her. But she knew not whether Mr. Andrews was to share in her affection, and she did not want to falsely raise the hopes of both the player and the most devoted spectator. 

“Well, to be completely honest, Jack, I’m looking for Mr. Andrews,” she mumbled, playing with her fingers.   
The blonde man smirked, skin alight with a red glow in the sunset. “Mr. Andrews, huh? You finally stopped bein’ blind, then?”  
Rose scoffed playfully and shoved him on the shoulder with the back of her hand. “Be quiet, you! If you must know, yes. He...He actually confessed his affection for me, after a fashion, and...and I suppose I’m finally through with being a puppet to everyone else.”   
Jack gave a boyish laugh and knelt his knees so his face was level with hers, giving her arms a brotherly shake. “That’s so great, Rose! I knew you could do it! I knew you weren’t like the rest a’ them! But then...why do you look sad?”

She frowned and turned from him and began to stroll slowly and he followed her. “Well, I denied him when he confessed. I told him he misinterpreted everything and what was between us was nothing more than two people enjoying the other’s polite company. I know I love him now, but I don’t know if he feels the same, or at least if he feels strongly enough that he won’t be discouraged by what I did.”   
Jack walked fast to catch up to her and shoved her gently with his elbow. “Rose, you’re bein’ stupid again. Of course, he feels the same! You can see it in his eyes when he looks at you or talks about you! I just talked to him a little while ago and I brought you up when we talked ‘bout the dance the other night. You shoulda seen him, Rose! He looked like he could cry and fly all at once!” 

With a jump Rose wrenched him with a strong arm, whipping him to face her, and stared at his smirking, relaxed face with wide, serious eyes. “You saw him? When? What did he say?”   
The man chuckled. _He’s clearly so very amused by this,_ Rose thought. _Bastard of a boy, he’s lucky I like him._ “Just a few minutes ago. He’s a real nice fella, Rose, talkin’ to me even when I snuck into First-Class territory, but I don’t even think he noticed, he was so distracted. He didn’t say much, just kinda listened.”  
“Oh, Jack,” she cried helplessly, rubbing her face with clammy palms. “I want to speak to him, I _must,_ but I’m so afraid! I must’ve driven him away with how stupid I was, I _know_ I have!”   
He turned her to him, gentler than when she had done the same, and his eyes were aglow as he cradled her face in his calloused hands. “Rose, stop it. Life’s too short to be thinkin’ about things that ain’t true, and if you think he doesn’t love you enough to withstand one rejection, then you’re bein’ really dumb. He does.”  
“B-But...this is going against everything I’ve ever known. _I’m so afraid,”_ her voice failed her, and for once, Rose DeWitt Bukater allowed herself to be vulnerable in the arms of someone she trusted with her whole soul.   
“I know you are, Rose, but I also know you’re strong as all hell. Life is way too short to be confined to your people’s rules, Rose. You love him and he loves you, so fuck what society thinks!”  
She gasped. “Jack!”   
He laughed, a conspiratorial giggle as she craned her neck to see if anyone had heard. “Well, you’re thinkin’ it, too! We all gotta do what our heart tells us to do. I have.”  
Her eyebrows peaked at the top of her forehead. “You have? How?”

Jack seemed to draw back a bit, loosening his grip on her face but never letting go, looking away from her. He looked unsure, but he wetted his lips and took a deep breath.   
“Me and Tommy. We...We kinda got a thing goin’.” 

Rose could not help the flush which crept up her neck to her cheekbones. She had heard about men being with men and women being with women, but it was considered so verboten it was not even whispered about over the First Class’s garnished glasses and seven-course meals.   
And yet, she did not feel affected nor repulsed and only wanted to hug Jack and Tommy to her for all eternity.

He gave a nervous laugh and stroked his thumb up to her flaming cheek. “Is this it, Rose? Have I finally driven you away from me?”  
“N-No! No, I-I don’t mind. I don’t mind it at all, I just never—So you’re—”  
“I’m both. I swing both ways. Bat for both teams, you could say. Never had a thing for a man before, so I guess you and I both can’t resist the Irish charm.”  
Rose sputtered and laughed, as did he and, for once, the urge even for curiosity’s sake to spy if the passersby were looking with arched brows and pinched lips escaped her completely. When they calmed, stomachs aching a wonderful pain, Jack gave her a pat to the cheek. 

“Last I saw him, he was headed towards the bow. Said something about inspecting the crows’ nest or somethin’, I dunno. Check there.”   
She could not help herself and it was like they were two alike magnets as she threw her arms around his neck and held him close, letting warm, relieved tears drip, coloring his brown shirt collar nearly black.   
“Thank you, Jack,” she said as she kissed his cheek.   
“Yeah, yeah. Now get over there before I drag you there myself! Then you’ll _really_ have some explainin’ to do!”

* * *

The bow was basked in orange light and the only sounds which pervaded the air were the whipping of the Union Jack flag above, the ocean beating against the ship’s hull below, and Rose’s thudding heart which harmonized in tandem with both. She stepped down each stair to the bow deck with careful feet as if she were crossing some sort of physical threshold, and she nearly jumped and ran straight back to the Lounge when she indeed saw a figure clothed in grey, leaning against the rails in front of the center anchor.   
She knew it was him, from the attire to the brown and silver hair atop his head and the notebook splayed open in his large hands, a charcoal pencil dancing across a white page. Thankful was she that the wind and the waves were so loud that her footsteps remained unheard, for she was not sure she would be able to withstand him hearing her before she was prepared.   
What she said, how she formed her words, how she let her true emotions bleed into them as she never had before could change her life and she knew it, and the very thought had her feet trembling in her heeled slippers. 

“Hello, Mr. Andrews,” she called without thinking, and the figure started and turned as if a ghost by which he had been haunted all his life, with a frozen gust of air, made a return to torture him once again. 

He said nothing, only closed the book and placed it carefully within his inner pocket. His hair scuttled against his forehead in the wind and he blinked, his face downcast and forlorn, expectant of nothing and his hope run dry. 

Rose could not help the smile that forged its way on her lips as her fingers trembled together. _So it’s all come to this._  
“I-I’ve changed my mind. No, that’s not right. I...I _realized_ you were right. It’s not a coincidence, how we feel and so quickly. I-It means something and it means something significant and I...I’d like to find out what it is...with you. That is…if you still desire me.” 

And then Mr. Andrews _smiled._

He smiled, too overcome with relief and emotion for his lips to part and his teeth to show, but instead, they delved within his cheeks as if he were implanting the feeling coursing through him at that moment in a single smile reserved only for her.   
Rose walked to him, more confident, more sure of every step until she was right before him, the love radiating like a holy glow and the shades of the sunset mixing together until she was too perfect to possibly be real.   
He said nothing still but held out his hand to hers which she took, unapologetically and unwavering.   
_So this is what_ right _feels like._

“Oh, Rose,” he said, Irish accent thick in his whisper, and he pulled her into his arms, wrapping them around her delicate figure as his body seemed to collapse in relief, in a disbelieving windfall.   
They held each other as the world around them seemed to change, as the sunset beaming around them seemed to deepen its colors to darker reds and yellows and oranges until it seemed an impossible hue, making acquaintance with the impossibility of their fulfilled love. The earth seemed to cease turning as everything slowly seemed so impossible in its existence, the colors of the sky, the nip of the wind, the ship beneath them. And that very ship, _his_ ship, was carrying them into the future, whatever it was, and for once, Rose was unafraid of it all, of the future and what dry land would bring unto her.   
She began to laugh into his shoulder, her body trembling as they mixed with relieved tears that cooled her burning face. “I feel like I’m flying.”  
“You _are_ flying, Young Rose. Look,” he detangled himself from her gently, cradling her right hand in his left palm like the most beloved flower, how the waiters in First-Class presented silver trays of teas and sweets, and she turned to look out into the vast and endless ocean, the horizon growing closer somehow but never moving.   
“Come, Josephine, in my flying machine,” he sang quietly, the words almost unintelligible, and she giggled, joining with him as their fingers interlaced. _“And it’s up she goes, up she goes!”_

He was nervous, she could tell; nervous to be free of his solitude, nervous about the fragility of what this was that they had, this meeting of hearts in denial of circumstance. She could tell he wondered when circumstance would become mightier than both of them and swallow them whole, but Rose could not bear to let him think such thoughts, not then, when life had chosen to be so sweet to them.   
Her small gentle hand reached to his face, caressing his cheek beneath her palm, studying intently the face of the man who had so shaken the reality she thought she knew. 

She could find no magic in those dark eyes, no sort of witchcraft or wizardry which could have enchanted her, but found only a human, kind and modest of temperament, humble of achievement and intelligence. It was all him that bewitched her, pure Thomas Andrews as Thomas Andrews was forged by God to be, that she loved as she never thought she would love in her entire life, and the divine simplicity of it sent her heart and mind reeling, unused to this new beautiful truth. 

He turned to look at her, eyes glistening gold in the setting sun, their faces closer than they had been in the Third-Class General Room after they danced their hearts out, closer than even when he had pleaded with her, cramped between the lifeboats, in what seemed like a lifetime ago.   
But it felt different, for their hearts had been almost strangers then, blushing and stumbling about each other in their rushed emotion, but now they were kindred spirits, united and unashamed of their love, no matter how quick or star-crossed it seemed. 

Rose delved her fingers gently into his skin, knowing he should never take that first cross of this inception and knew she must for the both of them, and she pulled him closer, slowly enough that it would seem he imagined it if he were to think about it. But all he could think about was the ocean of her eyes and the ruby of her lips as they came so very close to him that all else ceased to exist in his gaze.   
They looked to each other’s lips, their sole craving for completion, to each other’s eyes and were reminded anew of their adoration for one another, and then back again. It was a painful and beautiful impasse in which they had found themselves, and Rose, emboldened by all her new thoughts and actions, was going to surge forward, close the damned gap which had haunted them for their souls’ eon but the real world’s days, when the most dreadful sound, carried by a southeast wind, reached their ears and tore them apart like a sheet of paper. 

The dinner bugle. 

Rose clamped her eyes shut, wishing it away like one does an alarm clock or bright bolt of lightning as a frightened child. She looked to him again and his eyes seemed to restore themselves, suited with armor for a return to the real world, and he smiled at her. 

“I-I must get to dinner. Mother will be looking for me,” she whispered, afraid for her strength should she talk aloud.   
“Yes, Young Rose, you must,” he nodded, boyish impishness returning to him.   
“Will you be there?” It was a beg poorly concealed in a question.   
“I’m afraid not. I’ve neglected dear Dr. O’Loughlin long enough and I’m to dine with him.”   
A giggle burst through her disappointed front, and she fell more in love with him for it, his next of many displays of kindness and amiability to all. 

“When will I see you? I don’t think I can bear to wait until tomorrow.”   
“No, nor I,” he pulled her from him, Rose hardly noticing, and led her to walk in the direction of the rest of the ship, the rest of the world in which they still had dues to pay. “Meet me in my stateroom this evening, after dinner. I hate the way I sound when I suggest it. I feel like a scoundrel, I promise you my intentions are honorable, but I’m afraid if we meet in the open we should be faced with a sort of attention that should be helpful to neither of us,” he took her hand in his, begging her with his gaze to believe in him. “A-36, on the landing of the Aft Staircase. I will see you then, Young Rose.” 

Without another word and with a kiss to her fingers which left her chest tingling in some sort of bittersweet prologue, he gave her a polite push to her arms and sent her on her way, as she tried frenetically to recover before she reached her chambers the tatters of her disguise of who she was supposed to be when who she truly was had finally grown beyond its bearings and torn it away. But she did it with a smile, a knowing smile that one only displays when they have the upper hand, a sort of secret knowledge absent in everyone else. 

And that secret knowledge was that she would kiss Mr. Thomas Andrews at long last when dinner was through. And with that thought that served as her strength against an eternally browbeating world, she began to hum quietly enough so only she could hear. 

_Come, Josephine, in my flying machine, going up, all on, goodbye!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it, darlings. Forgive the tease, again! 
> 
> **Be forewarned:** the next chapter and the chapter after that will be increasingly...how should I put this...living up to the story's rating. Interpret that as you will. 
> 
> I will be back with you in a moment, my darlings. I hope you enjoyed it and I can't wait to hear what you have to say! 
> 
> Until next time, and with all my love, 
> 
> -m <3


	9. Of Rendezvous and Portraits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Molly Brown catches on, Rose has a wicked idea, and Thomas Andrews finally gives in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my darlings! I am back! 
> 
> I am far less than satisfied with this chapter, but I shall leave it up to you to decide how it is! 
> 
> **_Also, I have BIG news!_ On Sunday, September 27th, 2020, I will be video chatting for a couple of minutes with Victor Garber!!! **
> 
> I'm so incredibly nervous, I have barely slept and everything I think I'm going to say doesn't sound right! If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them! I'm so excited to tell him how much I love him but I'm so so so very frightened and nervous. I hope he likes me, and that he doesn't forget me. I plan on telling him, definitely, that he restored my ability to write by inspiring our story :) All I want him to know, really, is that he's loved and appreciated and criminally underrated. Also, it will be recorded so if anyone should like to see me probably crying in front of Victor after Sunday, I'd be glad to share it, hahaha!
> 
> Enjoy, my dears!

** _Saturday,_ 13 April 1912 **

Molly knew. 

How she could have figured out what had occurred between them just a half-hour previous and what he proposed to her before they parted, Rose was sure she would never know. But as she sat to dinner, a perfect hybrid of stoicism and _savoir-faire_ which she had learned to exude with prowess over the years, watching with iron eyes for the slightest squirm of Gracie’s or Ismay’s person that might suggest he would stand and lead the men to the Smoking Room, she felt Molly’s maverick eyes upon her, glinting in the light of the Dining Saloon, and Rose knew immediately that Molly knew. 

Perhaps her eyes were too flighty and her pupils a bit too wide by virtue of her wandering mind, or perhaps she had caught sight of them, two small figures floating on the vision of the horizon towards the unseen southwest, and her unrest at every small movement of the men surrounding them lead Molly by the hand to the quotient of an equation she did not know needed solving. 

Or, perhaps, it was none of these, and Molly could simply read her just as he could and she could the both of them, in the way that only the Elite Misfits knew how. 

Rose hardly knew time was passing, for she sat in a blur as if she were within a glass box and all around her was muffled and unfelt, and she looked upon Molly Brown as a sort of mortal clock for, as the courses passed and the desert trolley danced about them and even as she fell into another one of her boisterous stories Rose usually loved so much, Molly’s eyes changed by the minute and by the hour just as the hands of a clock would. They never strayed from her for long and, as the seconds ticked closer to when all would part and the night truly begin, those eyes only gleamed brighter and squinted mischievously until they were slits narrow as a cat’s pupil in the sunlight, the crown atop her subtly smirking lip. 

Her story wound to an end and the laughter slowly faded to a concluding and comfortable silence, and Rose dared look up at Molly, fearful of what she just might find ready to be read in her gaze, and found a knowing espièglerie that had her grasping the tablecloth brushing her thighs with nervous fingers.   
The rotund woman gave her one last mirthful smirk before taking a breath and turning to the rest of the table. “Boy, I am ready to drop! You bunch sure know how to wear a lady out!”   
Ismay jumped at this and looked to his pocket watch, erecting himself from his chair, at last. “Ah yes, forgive me, the hour has grown late. Join me for brandy, gentlemen?” 

Without a word, like soldiers or an apparatus following an order, the menfolk stood and bowed their farewells to the ladies as they walked off. Rose felt as though she could breathe for the first time since she had entered the Saloon and let her features fall and her tired eyes drop to her knees.   
“Come, Rose. I think we shall retire. I’ve a headache,” her mother said.   
It was the command of a mother to a child, certainly not to an engaged woman who had come out in society more than a year previous, but Rose could not find it within her to be upset or insulted. All she cared about was throwing herself into Mr. Andrews’s arms and never letting go until the sun betrayed them and made itself known.   
So, with a dutiful, “Yes, Mother,” she placed her napkin daintily on the table before her and stood, slowly enough to fool all but Mrs. Brown. As she passed by, the woman in question caught her wrist and looked up at her, eyes kind and motherly, but that same impishness sat just behind as if hidden by a gossamer curtain.   
“Good luck, honey,” Molly whispered to no one but her, a playful and loving wink like punctuation. 

How she loved this woman, Rose realized. How suddenly she knew when the night was through she would have a confidante with whom to recount it, one of earnest interest and assured discretion.   
She had no words she could speak, for none could properly convey her feeling this unacclimated sort of maternal love Margaret Brown brought with her words unto her. All she could do was smile and lace her fingers with hers, giving her hand a squeeze which, as she relinquished Molly and caught up with her mother, Rose hoped said all she could not. _Thank you,_ it said. _I trust you with all my innermost thoughts and you shall be the only soul in this world besides us who will know the entire truth. I promise._

* * *

“I think I will go right to bed. Trudy, come and help me undress,” Ruth said once they returned to their stateroom, beginning to unfasten her earrings, sauntering into her chamber, Trudy following suit before the door shut behind them. 

Rose stood for a brief minute. Her mind turned to her appointment for which the time was drawing inexorably near. She wondered what would happen in the hours she was resigned to stay with him and away from reality. Yes, she refused to go the night without finally kissing him as she had so dreamed, but what then? What should they do to pass the time? The wheels within her head began to turn nearly as fast as _Titanic’s_ propellers as she smiled a wicked smile and skulked conspiratorially to her room, the article of clothing she so desired quickly procured and the safe, in which lay the final item needed for her plan lay patiently waiting, opened. 

As she finished dressing, butterfly comb sitting softly within her tresses and her mink coat wrapped about her, gently brushing the floor and her more than indecent attire within, her anxious eyes spied the gold and mahogany mantel clock.   
Nearly 9:30.   
She was about ready to cry out and stamp her foot in frustration when she heard the door of her mother’s chamber creak open and saw Trudy step gently and carefully out. 

“Is my mother asleep?” Rose asked, holding the lips of the coat together across her chest.   
“Yes, Miss.”  
She nodded and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Trudy, can you keep a secret?”  
“Yes, Miss, I believe that I can.”  
“Well, this is a big secret. It’s a secret you can’t tell anyone else, but I trust you with it.”  
“I’m honored, Miss. I shan’t tell another soul, I swear to you on my mother’s grave.”  
“Oh, don’t do that!” Rose grasped her arm in a sisterly caress. “Have you met Thomas Andrews?”  
“Not formally, Miss, but I’ve seen him pass by and I know his maid, Lucy.”  
“What do you think of him?”  
“It’s not my place to think anything of him, Miss, but he seems a very kind man. He had never seen me before but he still smiled at me when I passed by and he seemed to bow to me as if I were a lady.”   
Rose smiled; she could see the picture so very clearly in her head, Mr. Andrews’s instinctive kindness and dear Trudy’s blush as she stood there, shocked stiff, feeling as though she were on top of the very world which looked down on her as nothing.   
“Yes, that sounds just like him. Well, he and I...well, you see...we’re involved, I suppose you could say.”

Yes, involved, indeed. Involved in what and with what and for what, Rose could not say for certain. 

“I heard Madam say something like that as I was leaving your room yesterday, if you’ll forgive my overhearing, Miss. But what about Master Hockley?”   
She shook her head, suddenly ashamed. “It’s rather dishonest, I cannot lie to you, Trudy. But we’ve both tried to deny what we feel, truly we have, but it just didn’t work. And you know how Cal treats me. You’ve seen it, I know you have. But Mr. Andrews, he...he is so different. He understands me, my thoughts and my desires, and does not judge me for my shortcomings. He is kind and thoughtful and he’s a genius that I can’t help but be awestruck over even as I love him as my equal. You remember seeing his name in all the papers, I’m sure.”  
“Yes, Miss, I do.”  
Her heart clenched in her chest, feeling the unbearable itch left by words left unsaid, and she grasped Trudy’s hand tightly, and cried, “Oh, Trudy, stop, just for a minute. Stop the formalities. After all, in the situation I am in, it would be hypocritical of me if I tried to enforce propriety. Pretend, just for a moment, that you are my friend in high society. Tell me what you think of it all.”

The girl was silent for some moments, overwhelmed with the offer and temptation of the breach of decorum. “I...I understand. I do and I do not judge you and I wouldn’t even if I had the right to. I think it’s all terribly romantic, if I’m allowed to say, Miss. You deserve happiness, Miss, and if he makes you happy then I can ask for nothing more.”   
Rose could have opened the door to their stateroom and run down the halls and up the staircases, shouting at the top of her lungs her relief and joy if she had an ounce more courage within her. _They would look up then,_ she thought. _Finally._

“Oh, Trudy, thank you. Thank you so much,” she exclaimed. “I’m going to see him, tonight, right now.”  
The girl gasped. “Is it wise, Miss?”  
Rose giggled. “No. No, it’s not wise at all. If anything, it’s wholeheartedly unwise, and that’s precisely why I trust it.”  
“Well, Miss, your mother shall not hear where you are from me.”   
The red-haired girl engulfed Trudy in a loving embrace, one she had never known from anyone for as long as she could remember, and pressed a kiss to a shy cheek as she beamed to her newfound friend and wordlessly made her way to the door. Rose took a deep breath and looked back to her, seeing only support and encouragement in her eyes, and with it she opened the door and walked off, a threshold unspoken crossed over and over which she could never retreat back. 

* * *

It took three small, dainty knocks upon his chamber door for Mr. Andrews to jump from the sanctuary of his desk and his surfeit of blueprints to the front of his stateroom. He opened the door to find his own personal, beloved Athena standing before him, draped in a fur that just barely veiled her ankles, her slippered feet small and shadowed just behind and below. 

“Oh, Rose,” he exhaled with a smile, nearly deflating against the door. “I figured for a while I had been much too forward and you would not come.”   
“Surely you know by now, Mr. Andrews, that I am not easily scandalized,” she beamed up at him, walking into his suite when he stepped to the side.   
“Oh, believe me, Young Rose, I would be a blind fool not to have noticed. Won’t you remove your coat?”   
Rose turned, vivid red hair brushing her shoulders in a heap of curls and she looked up to Thomas under her bristly, long, tilted raven eyelashes, the green mountains and blue sky of her eyes lined with a black horizon. “Well, you see, before I do, I should like to tell you of the idea I had.”   
“What kind of idea? And what does this have to do with your coat?” He asked, furrowing his brow as he walked further into the room and leaned back against his mahogany desk, apprehensive for something he could not possibly know.   
“Well, you showed me your notebook out on the deck yesterday morning. You remember?”   
His confusion amped within him. “Yes, of course I remember. I recall you taking a particular interest in my sketches of _Titanic_ and of Elba.”   
Sparkling, perfectly white teeth showed through her plump ruby lips, a light blush dusting her milky cheeks. “Yes. I was very, very impressed. And that’s when I got to thinking…”  
Silence prevailed for some minutes as Rose took her bottom lip between her teeth, wringing her fingers in front of her as if she could truly fool him into thinking her a shy, demure lady. And yet, in the few days which felt to his soul the equivalent of one million eternities over that he knew Rose DeWitt Bukater, he knew she was as far from the rest of the women in First-Class as the Arctic was from the emerald hills of Ireland.   
“Yes, Rose? What is it?” 

“Mr. Andrews…I want you to draw me, and I want every stroke of your pencil to be filled with as much love as if you were sketching _Titanic_ herself.” 

A dirty liar he would be if he said he was not shocked, and the manner in which she voiced her request, voice husky and lilted and, dare he say it, nervous, instilled in him the belief that it meant more to her than simply an artist sketching a subject. Dare he even entertain the idea, the apparition he wanted so desperately he could nearly taste it on his tongue, she sounded like a lady asking to be drawn by her lover.   
“Why…o-of course I will, Rose,” he cursed his stammering like a cowardly schoolboy and he felt perspiration beginning to bead at the top of his brow.   
“But do you understand what I mean, Thomas?” _His first name._ She had never called him by his first name, and the shot of lighting, pure electricity, to his loins at this combined with her fur coat falling from her shoulders to a puddle on the floor nearly had him doubling over. 

Beneath the coat was a black silken kimono, almost completely transparent and leaving little to his already wandering mind. Through it, though he clenched his hands to the lip of his desk in the attempt to keep his eyes in a more gentlemanly place, he could see a large jewel sitting atop pert, round breasts, even milkier white than her cheeks. For the sake of his sanity and decorum and her integrity, he disallowed his eyes from venturing lower. 

“Yes. Y-Yes, I understand what you mean.” He gave up any attempt at remaining steadfast and eschewed the temperament of a man disinterested. He could not even pretend such a thing if it would save him from death. 

“Why, you seem so surprised! Do you forget I’ve known you to have done this before?” She laughed, the infernal girl.   
“No, I haven’t forgotten. But...I was so young then.”   
“Oh, stop it, Mr. Andrews. You’re as able-bodied now as you were then, I’m sure, and even more talented and artistically well-versed. In fact, I wouldn’t rather anyone else draw me, not Picasso or Monet or even Michelangelo himself. I want _you_ to do it, and only you.” 

He could say nothing, and only smiled nervously with trembling lips, willing the perspiration to not weep down his temple.   
“Shall you be wearing that?”   
She giggled, toying with the lips of the robe sitting atop her chest. “Oh, this old thing? Certainly not. That will spoil the aesthetic, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Andrews?”  
“Yes…Yes, I suppose I would. Well, what shall you be wearing, then, Miss DeWitt Bukater?”   
The robe parted just at her sternum in reply, bringing a giant blue faceted stone glinting into the light like a newborn. “Do you see this?”

He nodded; it was all he could manage by now. 

“It’s a fifty-six karat diamond called the Heart of the Ocean.”  
“I see. It is very beautiful, especially on you, if I may be permitted to say so, Rose. And you’re telling me you’ll be wearing the Heart of the Ocean in your portrait?”  
“Yes, I will wear this. But only this. Nothing else.” 

If the blood were not thrumming so heavily in his ears and throat, he would have been sure he had died and she was an archangel, coaxing him and guiding him to Temptation. He turned from her for a brief moment, overwhelmed at the image and not at all prepared for the onslaught of its reality, and covered his weakness by reaching for and sharpening his charcoal pencil and procuring his beloved notebook. Though, no matter how much he loved his notebook, he would have thrown it over the side of his ship if it meant he could have her at that very moment, for God knew he wanted it more haughtily than anything he had ever wanted in his life. But if he had learned anything in his twenty-three years in the business of building and designing ships and the five years in which he waited with baited breath for his beloved _Titanic_ to be completed, it was to be patient, and Thomas Andrews considered himself to be nothing if not an exceptionally patient man. 

“Now tell me, where would you have me?” Rose asked, pulling forth the butterfly comb from her tresses and letting them run free in a waterfall of fire down her back. He gulped.   
“Um…Right there, on the divan.”  
She sauntered over, the kimono flying in a black shadow behind her, the sound of silk getting caught in between her sumptuous legs as she walked like the sweetest music and the sharpest knives on his ears all at once. Mr. Andrews took a seat in the chair before the divan, lighting a candle just on the table to his left and throwing the match into some corner of the room.   
They looked on one another, lustful brown eyes to lighthearted, mischievous teal, fighting a war over the candlelight between them, just begging the other to put an end to the passionate desperation that was tugging mutually on them like a rope tied to their respective souls. 

He noticed distantly and with a pang of confusion that she did not sit or lay; she simply stood between the table and the upholstery, seemingly thinking or plotting. And then, time seemed to slow as she reached to her chest, pulling gently on the fabric of the gown, throwing it over her shoulders so it cascaded down her back and creamy, forbidden skin came into the yellow light. It fell over her bottom and he grasped his notebook for purchase in tight, damp fingers, clenching his teeth and feeling his Adam’s apple bob in his throat as the replete, forbidden flesh made acquaintance with his eyes, and from there, her nubile and lithe legs. 

The desperation to have her did not fade, and his unfailing devotion to her and every inch of her danced within his mind like a petulant wind, but it all remained a velleity, sitting like a heavy rock in his chest. The air turned naturally from lust to simple adoration, and Thomas Andrews could do nothing but admire Rose DeWitt Bukater in her somatic form with all the love his raging heart could muster. She was baring herself to him, allowing him to see with his flawed and unworthy eyes the beauty of what the corsets and stockings and slips and gowns hid away from men and the rest of the world. Without words, she was accepting him, placing her golden trust and her beating heart in the palms of his calloused hands.   
This was the first act, the first antecedent of their gratified _affaire de cœur,_ and she knew it and he knew it and still she did not falter. And she did all of this without even the slightest hesitation, second and first thoughts discarded, and he knew then that he loved her, more than he had ever loved anything on the Earth and more than he would ever love anything ever again. 

At last she lay, sprawled in all her snowy glory like the Nude Maja, shifting around and fumbling with her arms, the smooth melody of her flesh against the velvet reaching his ears.   
“T-Tell me when it looks right,” she said, a hint of true timidity in her voice, tinged with the enthrallment of this new sensation, looking to him for approval.   
“Put your arm back where it was, on the pillow,” he stuttered, and she obeyed. “And put your other arm up, your hand right by your face.”   
She did as he said, and he tried desperately not to fixate on how the flicker of the fire just before them glowed on her arm in a golden facsimile. “Now, head down, keep your eyes on me, Young Rose, and try to stay still.”   
Rose giggled until a single precious dimple displayed itself on her left cheek, and she shuddered and bit her lip in an attempt to steady herself into calm submission. Mr. Andrews took a deep tremulous exhale, as if with the inhale he pent up every second of their past and with its release a change became him, and this new territory in which they had found themselves made home within him.   
He took his notebook in trembling hands and, with the sharp point of his charcoal, made the first stroke. Slowly, her dainty thin fingers came to his vision under it, and he squinted, trying with glazed eyes to make out every particular detail. 

“So serious,” Rose teased, furrowing his brow and frowning in a kind and affectionate imitation of him, until her voice came out like a child just beginning to properly articulate.   
Thomas could not help but smile on her, his artistic blood flowing directly to his arm and eyes so they worked free of him, while Rose DeWitt Bukater’s spirit engulfed all the rest of him.   
Her arm came to be and then her face, and though she was more exposed literally and figuratively than she ever had been before a man—before anyone!—and was being scrutinized by the most detail-oriented gaze, Rose had never felt more comfortable and adored than she did with his chocolate brown eyes peering every handful of seconds over the barrier of black leather alight with the fulgurating glow of the flames. 

When the charcoal danced over the sketch of her breast and his finger came to lovingly caress it to a smooth shade, Thomas found himself starting and shifting about in his chair, his eyes turning suddenly nervous and the leather cover falling slightly and betraying his face.   
Rose smiled again. “I do believe you’re blushing, Mr. Big Artiste.”   
He chuckled silently with a convulsion of his shoulders and a tightening of his lips, just as he had when he sat across from her at the luncheon table that second day of the voyage when she so fearlessly displayed her poorly-concealed wit, and with another glance at her gripped the charcoal tighter until it was under the threat of snapping beneath his fingers as he delineated the half-moon of her right breast.   
“I can’t imagine Monsieur Monet blushing.”   
He tittered, suddenly breathless at the prospect of speech. “He does _landscapes,_ Young Rose.”   
It was not lost on her how thick his brogue had grown since the night’s beginning, flowing with the thickness of desire that she knew perfectly matched with the thundering of her soul behind her heart. She grinned and let out something of an ancestor of a laugh, forgetting how to be still.   
“Relax your face, Young Rose. No laughing,” he gently admonished, kind as only he knew how to be.   
“Sorry,” she licked her lips again and bit the inside of her cheek, and, with a single deep breath, went still again. 

There was but one word throbbing against his temple.   
Love.   
It was simple, predictable, and yet he loved even that, how with her and about her no metaphor was intertwined. He simply loved her, the fire within her heart that bubbled over and combusted each word she spoke, the beauty unmatched in any other being he had ever witnessed or beheld, and how such beauty and such spirit interlaced and found its way to him like the kiss of sea air on the coasts of Ireland, and possessed him to create his best artwork of which he could finally be proud. It was not skill which made it so, nor practice nor determination, but pure, unadulterated, boiling love, theretofore shoved away with the intensity of time and circumstance which could be suppressed no longer. Already their love was creating beautiful things, physical and emotional, art with a depth of meaning that no one else could ever understand, and electricity in the air that was tinged with a certain sweet torture, enhanced only by the illicitness of it all. 

The features of her face, delicate as they were in life, were formed with a brush of a stroke, her tiny waist forming in the valley of a curve until it blanched to nothing. It was an assembly of lines, curved and straight, light and dark, and yet it made his heart capsize in his undeserving chest, and the memory, even so fresh, of what had prompted the creation of it played behind his eyes like a dream as he glanced at the finished work, unending. 

“Would you like to see it?” Thomas asked, finally looking to her bereft of the influence of constitution, back to himself, and his devotion to her washing over him again like a wave.   
She did not answer but only smiled, slowly rising from her position so her curls fell and swept against her shoulders and back, the tinkle and clink of diamonds to silver dancing about the air as she skittered, absent of clothing, behind his chair. Her face was deathly close so that he could feel the girlish, enthusiastic heat flowing from her cheek to his, the smell of lavender from her hair reaching his nose, and he could hear the breath rushing from her as she grinned.   
“It’s exquisite, though I do believe you were somewhat generous in your impression of me,” she quipped, and he felt her eyes on him.   
“Nonsense, Young Rose. I am a very serious and literal artist. I simply draw what I see, uninfluenced.”  
He took the charcoal between his tired, blackened fingers again, signing his signature beneath the fading sketch of her right leg, and dated it. 

**13 April 1912  
_Thomas Andrews_**

_Now I'm a part of his collection forever,_ Rose thought with pride. Within those drawings of all the things he loved, she was included, and always would be, no matter if life, cruel mistress that it was, dictated that they should be separated at the voyage’s end. He would always find her in the midst of his selective subjects no matter what became of them.   
The thought brought a smile to her lips that she could not refuse; even if she had tried to wrench the corners of her mouth down again they remained tenacious. But she did not try, for it was a happiness she did not want to deny herself and so she let it be. 

She unclipped the necklace from her throat, sighing with relief when the weight was free from her, and picked up the black robe with a flutter of silk.   
He dared to look at her again, his temptress, as she slipped the fabric over her shoulders. She did it with an ease of manner and a disinclination that told him she had no intention of leaving him, and only did so because any form of civilized society would dictate it be so and even she was not prepared to betray it in full. It was like a last single thread tying her to what just four days ago was her reality, and she had not the bravery to sever it alone. 

His eyes watched the mesh lay gently on her shoulders and cloak her arms as he placed his notebook safely in the drawer of his desk. All too suddenly, the heat, the burning, electrifying inferno within him was rising to a fever pitch until, like the steam from the coal sweeping _Titanic_ across the Atlantic, it freed him from doubt and sent him forward. 

A gentle hand was placed atop hers and she froze, holding both of the laces of the garment in her hands, following the blue-clothed arm all the way to the shoulder and face of Thomas Andrews, his eyes gleaming as they watched her, passing a silent declaration to her. His jaw was tense, the muscles beneath his clothes hard and taut, and though his touch was fleeting and unsure, it was desperate. 

His touch was a plea. 

When she did not protest, he let his fingers carefully curl in a loose grip around her wrist and it felt as though her skin burned with an illusory blaze hotter than the fire roaring at that very moment in his stateroom's fireplace. Rose’s breathing quickened, her chest rising and falling quicker and struggling with a judder that neared an inability as she felt as though dreaming his tender tug on her.   
Finally she let their eyes meet, and it was all too certain. There was no doubt that Mr. Andrews was there, the perpetual modesty resting beneath this withering front, masked by the glaze of the eye and the blowing of the pupil, the reddening of the skin and the quivering of the frame.   
The river that flowed between them, whatever it truly was, began to rush angrily in their ears. 

_“Rose…”_ Thomas whispered, lips barely moving, speaking pages of a love letter in a single word: her name, which he spoke with more love and life than she had ever known.   
The river swelled and flooded beyond its bearings at last and assailed their respective territories and selves, drowning all inhibitions and incertitudes once and for all. 

The onslaught of sharp exhales was heard from both of them and those very breaths met between their bodies and danced together a jubilant waltz until they were crushed when Rose leapt and met him eagerly in his offering. She threw her arms around his neck when she felt his wrapped tightly around the small of her back as, at long last, they were engulfed in a passionate kiss. 

If Rose had cared enough to listen, she would have heard a _sotto voce_ snap in the back of her mind as the remaining string binding her to her once-reality snapped. The threshold was crossed and the final thread was severed. There was no going back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it, my darlings. 
> 
> I know, I'm a tease! But finally, am I right? 
> 
> Did you notice that after he has the exhale before he begins to sketch her, he’s referred to as ‘Thomas’ and not Mr. Andrews, anymore? New territory, indeed :)
> 
> Another forewarning: the next chapter will be quite explicit. 
> 
> I probably won't have the next chapter out before Sunday, so please send me your luck then because I need it so I don't die in front of Victor, haha! 
> 
> As always, I love you all and will forever! 
> 
> All my love,  
> -m <3


	10. Of Love, Consummation, and Sunrises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Thomas and Rose's love comes to a head, and the sun rises in the east.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, my darlings! How angry with myself I am!
> 
> It's been over a month, as you know, since I've updated. I beg of you to forgive me. Life has been hectic and I went through a serious strain of writer's block and I didn't want to give you something half-hearted. This chapter wasn't very up to par and you can tell I was blocked as it goes on, but I did my best and God knows I've kept you waiting long enough!
> 
> Let me say, Victor was so, so, so very lovely. He was so kind and friendly, even after talking to dozens of people before me. He told me he was so proud of me for continuing to write and told me to be kind to myself, and he said hopefully soon we'll be able to get together and meet in person. Oh, what a wonderful human he is! He’s the kindest person I’ve ever met and I still can’t listen to it, especially the “I’m _so_ proud of you,” without bursting into tears.
> 
> I shall leave the link to our chat in the end notes! Please let me know what you think! :) 
> 
> Also, I am blown away by your comments asking about updates. I know how frustrating it is when an author doesn't update, especially when prior to this I was updating so frequently, and I'm so grateful for your patience and understanding and I won't leave you hanging again, my darlings. I'm here to stay. 
> 
> And, finally, be warned, **_this chapter is rather explicit!_** So if you don't like love scenes, I would skip over this chapter! <3

** _Saturday,_ 13 April 1912 **

He was not a stranger to this.

He had had a lover in his childhood, Niamh, and both of them in their youth had been curious enough that he could equate his venereal awakening to her.  
He had had a fiancée and then a wife and with her, a daughter. Thomas Andrews was not a stranger to the ways and joys of the flesh, what preceded it or what happened in the midst, and yet he had never kissed anyone nor had he been kissed by anyone as he kissed Rose DeWitt Bukater and as Rose DeWitt Bukater kissed him in return. 

His wife had never been one for deviation, not from what was expected of her nor from what she expected from everything and everyone else. It was expected of her to be a complacent wife, to bear him children and rear them, and she expected him to conform to a contrived sort of conduct in what he felt should be free and spontaneous. She endured their lovemaking (if it could even be called such) simply because it was expected of her. She did not want it, she did not crave him and desire him as he felt one should desire their lover—as he had her in the early days of their courtship—but she knew her role and her duty and so she lay, unenthusiastic and unaffected, like an inanimate instrument for his pleasure simply because he was a man and men needed such things.

Even their kisses, so simple a task and so easy for two people in love, were monotonous. She would never kiss him first, but she always knew when he would kiss her even before he decided he would do it.  
It would never last more than a second, for he could not bear the evidence of her disinterest, executed in the stillness of her lips against his, and she always knew when they would come; when he left the bed in the morning for the shipyards, after supper, when a considerable advancement on _Titanic_ had been made, when Elba stood or walked or spoke an imitation of a word. It was all like clockwork; the kisses, the intercourse, the conjured words of affection.  
It was all like clockwork when Thomas figured it should be instead two spirits bursting for freedom in enslaved bodies. 

But this was different. It was passionate and deep; free from the naivety of youth and from the reticence that came from the upkeep of proper societal practices even as an adult.  
It felt as though their lips would fuse, unable to ever part. Beneath the searing passion engulfing him, he could distantly feel his teeth being pressed against his flesh from the force, but he could not bring himself to even attempt to care, not when he finally had her in his arms and her mouth to his. 

They parted for air at long last, loathe to be apart again and so they painted their breaths against each other’s lips, just far enough away so that black eyes could gaze adoringly at the glazed turquoise irises that glimmered with a vivacious concupiscent allure to which he so quickly and willingly fell victim.  
He reached a hand to her sternum, where the diamond had so recently made home, stroking his calloused thumb across the untouched skin. He felt the rise of the embonpoint of her chest upon her sharp intake of breath, and the sound brought with it a confidence so usually unheard of in him which rose in his veins like a plant bursting to life from the fertile earth. He ventured further still to the aiguille of her collarbones that stood softly protruding, the valley just below them shadowed from the light of the fire. She trembled under his touch, subtly at first but as his fingertips danced—a single thumb and then all five of his fingers, the kiss of a caress to a firm brush—it grew until it was evident in her breathing with every shaking inspire. 

“Rose, you must stop me. Tell me to stop,” his voice was croaking, the brogue of his homeland thick and compact on the back of his tongue.  
She started beneath him and, without looking, he felt her eyes on him, confused and desperately questioning. “What? Why?”  
“I’m a married man and you are a betrothed woman. I am old enough to be your father. I know all these things and yet I am driven senseless by my desire for you, and so I must leave it to you to stop me.”  
“You told me your marriage was all but over and that your wife doesn’t understand you,” at some point within their exchange of speech, he had found himself behind her, his body still inches distant, safe yet from the point of no return. His palm remained flat against her shoulder, his thumb brushing the pulse point upon her throat. 

“It is and she doesn’t,” he replied, sucking in air as her head fell back to where her brilliant curls began to tickle against his waistcoat.  
“Well, I understand you, Thomas,” Rose gasped when the use of his Christian name, still so fresh a change between them, caused him to delve the tips of his fingers ever so softly into her flesh. “And you understand me, and I desire you just as you do me.”  
_She did not understand._ She did not understand and hence was intertwining the hands of their souls and guiding him further to an inescapable allurement against which his resolve was collapsing with each pound of her heart hammering against his thumb.  
“Nevertheless, you must tell me to stop.” 

She did not, and, against his better judgment, he pulled her against him, her gossamer-adorned back pressed to his warm chest. Rose did not want to ignore the pounding just by her left shoulder blade which she knew to be his heart. Even hidden by three layers of clothing, it was unmistakable and she could not help but feel like an Olympian, and this evidence of his abrading resolution the gold medal around her throat, heavier and more conspicuous than the cerulean jewel. It thumped harder still as his palm, gentlemanly even in the face of their searing arousal, found itself on her half-clothed stomach. The tickle of the touch was done away with and even as her muscles twitched and goosebumps rose on her snowy arms, she pressed more firmly to him, a silent declaration of her building steadfastness as his own melted in the indecipherable space still between them. 

“Tell me to stop,” he repeated, almost as if begging her. 

Rose kept her lips tightly fused and they did not fight her, for her logical and emotional mind, for once, were in tandem, poisoned with the sweet venom of desire spurned from true, unselfish love. Thomas wanted her just as she did him and she would not let him slip from her; she would sooner die by a sword wielded in her own hand. 

And so, even as he squeezed her small hand in his sweltering fingers and pressed their mutual touch to her collarbones again, she did not speak. 

“Stop me. Stop me now, Rose,” It was so much less of a plea now, for his captivation and his undeniable appetence was nearly set surely within his bones; he whispered it upon her ear, close enough that she felt every rush of breath from every consonant and vowel.  
Their fingers fondled the collar of the kimono and Rose followed his prompting, their grasps sharing in mutual touch, and they pulled it from her shoulder so it fell around her elbows, trapped from entire escape by his chest pressing it to her back. It was like his own final thread when she had just cut hers with the scissors formed from the sharp blade of their love, and she was damned if she was going to let him remain tied to what was no longer their reality. And so, Rose stepped forward slightly enough that he did not notice until she felt the breeze of free, tepid air upon her spine and the fabric fell to just before her bottom. 

“Tell me to stop. Now, Rose,” Thomas all but demanded in a low, rumbling growl upon her, the words fighting through the barriers of his clenched teeth, and Rose was amazed to still recognize the sheer kindness as if just behind the command was him saying in the voice she knew so well, _I’m only doing this for you, Rose._

A gasp she had not felt form escaped her throat when his touch ghosted over her throat and his fingertips came to rest just beneath her jaw. Her arms were again free and, frustrated with his chivalry and humbleness beyond what the intolerant girl still residing in her soul could handle, she stomped forward and shoved with a rough jerk of her arms the robe entirely from her form until she was as naked as she had been just before, splayed on the divan beneath his artistic eyes. It was his turn to gasp before his breath settled into a defeated huff when she spoke, as steadfast as a rock squeezed in his hand.

_“No.”_

And there was the quiet snapping against her ears again, only this time she noticed it, and she did so with a great feeling of triumph that she nearly laughed and would have, had Thomas’s fingers not curled surely around her jaw and wrenched her face to his where he kissed her more roughly than she had ever known a kiss to be. And yet, the sensation, no matter how unexpected, was far from unwelcome. Theirs was a passion that reminded her of boiling water or angry steam, breaking from its bearings beyond what anything could suppress it. It was love, calm and assured, but the desire unanswered had become too impatient in both of them and the call to attention was one neither of them could ignore, even if they had desired to do so.  
Rose wrapped her arms around his neck once more, feeling him yank her to him until no aperture remained between their aching bodies, and yet still it was not close enough for either of them. She allowed Thomas to maneuver her for, no matter how influenced her actions by ardor, she was still inexperienced on the ways of copulation having delayed Cal for so very long, and she did not protest when he began to walk them both, clumsily and into more edges of furniture than they cared to remember, to his desk, where he lifted her to sit, just before one of his esteemed blueprints. His desk, the foundation of all his wondrous ideas and creations since _Titanic_ had set sail, and there she was, sitting on it as the genius Master Shipbuilder himself ravaged her lips as if they were his sustenance when he was near death. 

It could have been hours that they remained there and Rose would not have noticed nor cared, his legs pressed firmly to hers, her hands clenching his waistcoat until her knuckles were white as ocean foam, stuck in their timeless utopia as they were, but Thomas tore them both from it with a cruel and dizzying shove when he ripped his lips away. When she regained her bearings, she saw his eyes regarding her, hooded and dense with the blackness of desire, so close it was nearly all that invaded her vision and she felt herself drowning in him all over again. 

“I will only do this if you’re sure, Rose,” he rasped, leaning ever so slightly towards her which told her that he wanted to kiss her just as much as she did, and her confidence remained strong.  
“I am sure,” she whispered. “I’ve never been so sure of anything in all my life.”  
“You must know that this was not my intent. I did not plan this. I do not want to take advantage of you.” He sounded nearly angry as he spoke; angry at himself for falling so deeply into their reverie or her for guiding him along the path to it, Rose could not tell.  
“You’re not, you’re not! And I know you didn’t, and neither did I! You are not taking advantage of me, Thomas. I want you to kiss me and touch me and...I want you to make love to me. Please, _please,_ make love to me, Thomas.” 

The palisades built around the kingdoms of their respective souls were not just breached; Rose felt that with her words and the flash within his eyes in silent reply was evidence enough that they were destroyed in their entirety, never to be rebuilt, and they were finally free beyond mirage and hope. There was no more wishing for them, for all they had fantasized became reality in the very palms of their hands when she spoke, more candid than she had ever been with another person and more honest and true to herself than she could ever remember.  
When Thomas kissed her again, like the sweetest punctuation and the embodiment of all they had denied themselves, she felt a new depth and a new passion which she figured had never become any two lovers ever before. No, this was their own. 

His kisses found their way under her jaw and down her neck; it was a maneuver she was used to in Cal, but she was wholly unaccustomed to the gentleness that came with it from Thomas, and in response she dared to reach to his woolen waistcoat, warm from the touch of his body. With shaking fingers Rose unbound him from his bearings with each button until it hung, lifeless and useless about his shoulders, and it was like second nature that he freed his hands from about her and let her small palms smooth up the sinews of his chest as no woman ever had and slip it from him until it fell down his arms and to the floor unnoticed. The next threshold of many was therefore crossed.  
Once free, Thomas lifted her as if she were air in his strong hands, and she shut her eyes and let the world rush around her in blind and dark gales as he carried her to his chamber, letting her fall gracefully to the mattress of his bed. Rose squirmed around and grasped at the sheets as if she were laying upon the softest cloud bound for Heaven and giggled, the angel choir to his heart and ears.  
This beautiful girl, so young and vivacious, and she was before him, wanting him as burningly as he did her. He could hardly believe it and feared the dastardly minute he would awaken from his deep slumber and all would be revealed to have been a dream. Thus, he resigned himself to make the most of what could so quickly fade from his grip, and so he rushed forward and kissed her again. 

“Mr. Andrews,” she quipped when she released their lips with a soft pop. “If you don’t undress yourself this instant I will scream until everyone on this ship comes to see what’s the matter.”

He did not laugh with her, for all too suddenly he was seized with an introversion and sheepishness which had not possessed him in a great many years, and the forefather of its return he had shoved away since the night they danced below decks.  
When he was courting Helen, he stumbled over words and his own worth, doubting it at every pass, hardly believing she would return to him each time they parted. It crested when he proposed; he startled her so violently, scared her with his blunders and muttering and pacing until he felt she had accepted him merely out of pity. He sent her a letter the following day, apologizing for frightening her and offering her an out, telling her if she would like to change her mind, he would not be insulted. But she did not rescind her acceptance and so such feelings found themselves buried beneath his consciousness, hermits to his manifested self. 

But now he sat before this woman, this young woman, so much younger than he, whom he loved so very much, who waited for him to bare himself to her just as she did to him. He distantly acknowledged the fact that Rose was used to the finest men, thick with muscle from riding and hunting and ruggedly handsome of face, suave and charming, genteel lure flowing from them like water. He was not one of them, he would never be, no matter how much Ismay or all the rest of the White Star Line executives and his First-Class peers wanted him to be. He was an Irishman and proud of it, of humble beginnings with noble names sprinkled across his family tree and not barrelled upon him as his only form of identity and self-worth. He was a shipbuilder when true First-Class gentlemen did not hold professions nor passions strong enough to sway opinions or dispositions, and he was bumbling in urbanity when the men who had surrounded him were taught the methodologies of it since infancy.  
He was nothing to the lot of them, for even if he designed the most luxurious ship in the world and the largest moving object made by the hand of man, a lack of pristine cultivation meant his forever status as a misfit. He was nothing to them, but he wanted to be something to Rose.

And so he reached for his collar, untwining his necktie. He could not help but wonder if he should suffer the same fate as it; he could not help but wonder if when he was exposed as his true self, free from embellishments of any sort as his necktie was when it hung as one plane, plumb piece of fabric, he would transform to nothing, and be forgotten as easily as his parallel was when it slipped through his fingers to the floor and he felt not a thing for it. 

But he could not think in such a way, he refused to. She was not Helen, she was not Ismay, perish the thought, she was not any of those out beyond his stateroom doors which saw him merely as a fabled figure, like he was a ghost haunting _Titanic_ and they paid their dues and good graces to him simply to save themselves from being haunted.  
They did not see a man with thoughts and feelings of his own, for fame had been brought unto him with his creation, and because of it was shoved into a life where feelings and opinions were denied and forbidden. They acknowledged the genius in him with indifference, as if it were a God-given birthright for them to experience and by which to be surrounded, as if saying as they conversed with him, “It’s about time.”  
He worked his animate mind and capable hands for a thankless crowd, floating in a forsaken ravine like _Titanic_ floating on the Atlantic, waiting without breath for someone who could only understand. And when Thomas met Rose, his lungs filled with precious air, and he knew.  
She would accept him, she did accept him, she would and did love him. And so he willfully stripped himself of his outer layer, the layer beyond which no one else cared to see, and sat before Rose DeWitt Bukater in nothing but his union suit. 

Beyond it, he could not look at her. He feared the second in which disgust would invade her eyes like a flood and he would be ripped from this, from her, with a ruder hand than a sudden awakening from a dream. But still his fingers worked, unbuttoning each button of his final layer, the substratum of protection against the world for his true, vulnerable self, as he had done so many times before but with so much less meaning, and soon the moment came upon him when there were no more buttons still enlaced, no more barriers physical or mental behind which to hide.  
As he slipped it from his shoulders as if it were an armor suit of steel, she seemed to understand, and when he dared look at her again, only loving sympathy swam in the oceans of her eyes. Rose reached for him, taking his hands in hers, speaking an unheard speech of a selfless sort of devotion he had never known in a lover. She pulled him down, he looking on her with curious wonder flashing within his irises caught in the golden light, and he felt his very pattern of breath hitch and fail him as his fiery little conductor lifted the back of his palm to her lips, as he had done to hers before dinner, as all men of status did to ladies. And yet, it was different, as were all things in which the two of them found themselves engulfed, and as she trailed her lips up his arms and across his chest, he knew he could never again play the polite gentleman kissing the back of a lady’s gloved hand without the image of Rose DeWitt Bukater, hidden within his chambers on the ship he forged with his own head, kissing his bare flesh barreling down upon his mind’s eye until he was blinded to everything else. 

Rose’s assault of kisses continued down his torso, and by the time she reached his hips, poorly hidden by the pristine white sheets in which they had found themselves intertwined, he knew the meaning behind her lips every move more certainly than anything. There was love, pure and simple, in every single one of them, never failing or tiring, telling him in no uncertain terms that he was accepted, he was loved, he was perfect in her eyes. And so certain a feeling, one of which he had craved certainty for all his adult life, had tears welling just beneath his pupils against which his pride was no match. Pride, decorum and politesse had no place in their constructed sanctuary; he had no use for them anymore, not when her depth of feeling was so chasmic. No man outside the doors would ever dare with full willingness let a lady be so bold, and yet when she rose back to him and enveloped his face within her tiny hands and pulled him to kiss her, nothing had never felt more right. 

But soon enough he could not bear the arousal, for it had risen again until it was impossible to ignore. Thomas wrapped his arms around her waist, trained to petiteness by years of tightly-laced corsets, and laid her as gently as his desire-driven hands would allow, letting her head drop to his pillow so her hair splayed into a halo of pure fire, matching perfectly the one that burned within her soul always, as well as the one raging just below his heart at the very sight of her.  
He was so close now, their hips perfectly aligned, their respective heats flowing to each other violently enough for them both to tremble within one another’s touch. His eyes rose to hers, begging for permission, offering her gallantly one last chance to recognize her folly and escape, but Rose only took her sumptuous legs and wrapped them around his waist in a show of pure carnal instinct, and she pulled him closer to her with artless, impatient arms. 

“Rose,” he could bear no shame now in the powerlessness of his voice. “What is something that makes you happy?”

Now she was positively confused. _How on Earth did he figure_ now _was the time for casual conversation?_

“What? Thomas, I…”  
“Please, Rose. Just tell me, what is something that makes you happy?”  
_You,_ she wanted to say, for beyond him, hardly anything in the reality of the universe in which she lived could be counted upon to make her happy. She settled on something she once hated but grew to love, the very thing which brought him to her. _“T-Titanic.”_

And with her single word, he felt every modicum of prideful strength leave him in a gust, for suddenly he was certain he was dreaming, and he was to awake any second, just as the sweetest chapter had come upon him. He did not want to wake, he did not want this to be a conjuring of his own mind, and so he took Rose’s arm from around his neck and slowly laced their fingers together, hoping with some distant thought that if he hung onto her as a lifeline he could be kept with her in this idyllic Eden.

“Tell me about it. Tell me everything you know about _Titanic,”_ he whispered.  
She was bemused still, he could tell; utterly confused as to why he was pulling her with an insistent hand into a conversation at what seemed to be the most inappropriate time, but his eyes remained absolute and she fought him no longer.  
“I-I know she is the largest moving object made by the hand of man in all of history, Ismay said so,” He let forth a disgusted shudder at the mention of the man at such a time but he punctuated it with a loving chuckle. _His Darling Girl._ “I know you designed her, every inch of her. I know you put in a new type of davits that could have held an extra row of lifeboats…”

Thomas allowed her to talk for some time, surrendered into his curious command, until he saw she had relaxed into the subject, thoroughly engrossed in the topic and searching every corner of her mind for her next thing to say. Then, and only then, he allowed himself to slip inside her, propelling himself until he could no more, bereft of hesitance and gradualness. 

Rose cried out, _Titanic_ a long-forgotten concern in the matter of a second and squeezed his hand with a strength that betrayed her small frame. He could not bear to see her in pain, no matter what pleasures it would bring, and he fell forward, stroking her silken hair with his free hand, pressing repeated kisses to her throat and cheek, and tried to ignore the ache of his heart when a single tear drifting down her face was caught between his lips.

“Oh, my darling Rose,” he was breathless despite it all, unable to ignore the feeling of her surrounding him as she did. “That is the worst of it, I promise you.”  
“Now I know,” she said between gasps as she shifted her hips in small, tight circles, trying to ease herself into comfort. “Why you made me talk.”  
He laughed a single note without breath against her neck, kissing her again, before falling to rest without weight upon her, the seconds he was forced to be still turning to agony, and he did not notice when he began to tremble violently atop her.  
But he did notice when a small hand was pressed against his shoulder, pushing him gently back so brown and blue eyes met in their tandem, and Rose encased his face in both of her palms, caressing him in loving wonder, the pain gone and only curiosity remaining. He cried out softly when she touched him, turning his head and pressing his mouth to her palm, burying his face within her touch as would a cat, kissing her thumb as she discovered the curvature of his lips. He knew her to know almost nothing of what was transpiring between them beyond what slipped through the lips of the less scrupulous and from her own natural urge, and yet she displayed an experienced sort of wisdom as his eyes pleaded for her permission and Rose gave a single nod of her head that to him was like permittance to Heaven. 

With it, he moved with a pull and thrust of his hips, and suddenly everything made sense. Every hardship of _Titanic,_ every harrowing sleepless night and logical roadblock, every spitfire fight with Helen, all was perfectly sound when he found himself inside her. He could not help the moan of pleasure, relief, completion that bubbled from his throat and he nearly fell on top of her again with the weight of their shared sensations on his shoulders.  
And Rose would have welcomed it, for this was her first step into something she had been taught by her mother to simply endure for the sake of her future husband, and yet she had not any words for the pleasure that surged through her until her veins burned. She clung to him as he fell into a steady rhythm, his hips never faltering nor tiring, slow enough that she felt every centimeter of him as he filled her and stretched her and still when he withdrew, teasing her with abandonment, unfailing with his every return. 

“Oh, _Rose...”_ she felt every hot breath and move of his lips pressed against the junction of her shoulder as he spoke. She delighted at how he said her name: a roll and a lurch of the tongue, a hiss of air through parted teeth, laced with Irish brogue and punctuated with breathless moans of pleasure.

On the occasion of his lovemaking with Helen, which were numerous at the beginning before shriveling and rotting into a thing of obligation, it was as if she were left bereft of all functions, in fear or disgust Thomas could never tell; but every time he found himself above her just as he was above Rose, Helen remained still, unmoving and accepting in a way he never knew he hated so very much until he had Rose’s ludic legs wrapped around his waist, pulling him into his every thrust forward like yearning arms. She was nothing like Helen, nothing like the woman he had chosen by his own volition, coaxed by the idea of what he thought she had been and convinced he could become what she wanted him to be, to call his wife; not in looks, temperament, nor in her exhibitions and sounds which would have been considered by any other man, he was sure, to be wanton and promiscuous. But it could not be to him, not the way she mewled against his ear, the cool air and the judder seeping and bleeding straight into him like wine to a tablecloth, nor how her small, curious hands smoothed down his damp shoulders and his spine, kissing him and loving him through touch, and certainly not when she raised her hips from the bed and met his forward thrust halfway, slamming them together until pain would have been registered in both of them had pleasure not had the upper hand, invading their courses of thought and feeling like enemy flanks. 

It was some moments of their mutual ministrations until he could not bear for any part of him to be untouched by her. He took his hand and stole one of her own from their paths across his back, lacing their fingers together tightly, until the tips of his fingers were splotched with pink and white, the blood beneath his skin displaced, just as was his reason or his consideration beyond anything besides the feel of her bracing around him, welcoming him with each renewed bury of himself in her warmth, until even _Titanic_ itself was dethroned from his brain for the first time in four years.  
_Titanic_ had invaded his every thought since the idea of her was first conceived, the prospect of her still in infancy, and not even sleep could offer him respite as he was occupied by her even more than the most involved and fanatical parent. And yet, Rose DeWitt Bukater had driven him to distraction; from the expectations of Ismay, the condition of his marriage with Helen, of everything that had ever posed a bother to him, and with the consummation of their love, even the stone placed in the center of his mind, heavier than even his ship herself, was now eroded and broken to pieces. 

Thomas pulled back to look at her, his beautiful Obstruction, her hair splayed about her, setting his silken white pillow aflame, untamed, her coral lips parted, granting entry and exodus to any and all sounds brought forth from the feelings given to her—given to her by him.  
And she felt his eyes on her, for hers opened, hardly the blue-green he loved so much, ripped starkly through by the spheres of heated black, the turquoise nothing but an afterthought in the midnight forethought of desire. And those spheres only grew, dominating more of the self she was leaving behind, as she took his hand and placed it, bereft of hesitation, to her left breast, encouraging him with the whine she let forth thus to touch her freely.  
He abandoned as much of the reserved gentleman which had been ingrained in him, singed like a branding to his intuition, as he took a calloused thumb and swirled it around her impossibly soft complexion before it came to rest atop her pert pink nipple, the pad of his fingertip dancing lighter than a feather. They moaned in tandem, just as they did most everything, their pleasures feeding off one another until they were both so overwhelmed that even just the slightest jerk of hips rendered them crying out to the quiet utopia embedded within the four walls he himself had designed.  
His hand, guided with a liquid sort of confidence that flowed in his veins, fed and supplied by her every gasp and moan, slid from her breast and down the half-circle curve of her waist, to her hips before his fingers ghosted just above the place where they were so furiously joined. Just the sight, they truly and undeniably coalesced as only the most devoted lovers can be, was enough that he knew the end was nigh no matter how much he wished it away and this pleasure to overtake them every second remaining in their mutual lives, and so he took his thumb, more daring than he could ever have hoped to be within his head, and brought it to where he was sure no other man had ever touched her, and where he distantly and selfishly hoped no other man ever would again. 

Rose cried out, her voice broken and shrill, shame and poise melted with the wax of the candlesticks surrounding them, bolts of sheer pleasure shooting up her every limb, bettered only by the thought of which she was constantly reminded of who it was giving it to her; _Thomas Andrews,_ the shy man, revered by all but himself, was touching her where even she herself had been too afraid to venture.  
She brought her fingers to his shoulders, her mind too fogged to realize her nails digging into his flesh until dainty little half-moons were imprinted on his skin, coated with blood. Her body spasmed, every muscle within her tightening until she trembled beyond her own pleasurable volition, and she grasped at Thomas with all the strength left in her little body as if he were salvation in the middle of the ocean and without him she would sink to her death.  
He whispered words of encouragement, his flaming face buried within the junction of her neck and shoulder, words she could not remember a second after they were spoken as her throat gave a myriad of sounds to his ears alone. He fingered her hair, brushing the stubborn curls from their place matted to her face with sweat, brushing it back, and it was the sensation to which she hung until the fog of intense pleasure faded and she was once more among the living.  
She panted for breath, melted like ice in his arms, and it was only when he gave his own moan of rapture and a stutter of his hips that she dared to touch him anew. Thomas groaned with every brush of her fingers on him and his body at last collapsed atop her, and yet she did not mind the weight and only held him tighter, kissing his hair in a comfort she had longed for all her life and of which she could think of no better way to give it than to Thomas as his own pleasure, fed and kindled by her love, came to a head.  
He let the pleasure wash over him like ocean waves, trembling beyond what he could ever control, moaning louder than what was most likely safe. He spilled himself inside her, ribbons of warmth settling within her that made her gasp, and his thrusts soon faded to nothing. His hips pressed against hers, still, as their hearts raged against their breasts and their minds, thoughts permitted again, filled with nothing but each other. 

Soon he regained enough of his strength that he pulled himself from her, a pain that was like severing a limb, and he brought his hand to her face, smoothing against the snow of her skin, her hair dripping and shining, the blue easing back to her eyes like the tide ashore. In what felt like a lifetime over he pressed his lips to hers, less fervent than the entire night preceding, slow in assured affection and pleasant exhaustion. 

“You’re trembling,” she remarked with a tired titter, brushing his hair from his face.  
“As are you, Young Rose,” he replied, swiping his thumb along her cheek. 

He wrapped a gentle arm beneath her shoulders, coaxing and pulling her gently until they were pressed together, he on his back and she curled into his side and her arm around his waist, the warmth of her falling upon him a pleasure to his heart even when he felt his body was so hot it would burn. His fingers began a waltz across her arm, her skin cool despite it all, and he pressed his lips to the crown of her head. Thomas touched her until he felt her trembles cease and her breathing even and he knew her to be asleep, finding himself alone but never more alive, feeling luckier than even he had when he was commissioned to design _Titanic._ It was a euphoria that was entirely alien to him, as if it had been locked in a vault inside him and Rose herself held the key in her hand. And with all unlocked sensations flowing and fading within him like steam, he wrapped his arm tighter around Rose until sleep took him over, too. 

* * *

** _Sunday,_ 14 April 1912 **

_“Rose,”_ her name reached her ears like an echo down a long hallway, and the speaker hundreds of feet away from her, the addendum of a spoken word. “Young Rose, wake up.”

She stirred, mumbling something she herself could not understand and turned from the offending sound which had pulled her from slumber. 

“Young Rose,” a gentle shake to her shoulder accompanied the word.  
“What?”  
“You must get up. The sun will be rising soon and you need to get back to your suite before dawn,” she knew distantly in her mind that it was Thomas speaking and when he pressed a kiss to her cheek her eyes finally opened. 

His room was still dark, the fire dying a slow death in the hearth, the candles worn and melted. Rose turned on her back, every movement feeling like a run of one-thousand miles, and saw him above her, dressed just as he was when the night had begun, smiling on her with tired eyes. 

She sighed. “Must I get up?”  
Turning again, she buried her face in his clothed chest and fisting his lapel in a silent plea. 

“Yes, my darling, I’m afraid you must, and don’t think it pleasures me to say so.”  
“I want to stay here with you.”  
“And I want you to stay here with me. But if Mr. Hockley or his man comes looking for you, we’ll be in more trouble than a few more hours of sleep is worth.”  
She scoffed. “Don’t say that name. Not now. He doesn’t exist here.”  
“You’re right,” he kissed her cheek again, standing and walking to the door. “Come now and get up, Young Rose.” 

She grumbled like a small, defiant child, pulling her naked form from the sanctuary of his bed, the impenetrable sanctuary they had created, and found her kimono and coat upon one of the sitting chairs, carefully folded with precise care. A smile grew on her lips, knowing that Thomas had done so, and she pulled them over her form and hugged them to her with an appreciation she had never known herself to bear for them.  
When she opened the door and found herself in the stateroom, he was sitting at his desk like a king on his throne, blueprints surrounding him like loyal subjects, his pen like a sceptre between his fingers. His brow was furrowed, his lips turned gently downward, the very picture of a man at work, scrutinizing his every thought. Rose could not help but giggle as she walked over to him, seeing him so lost in his reverie that he did not notice her until she spoke. 

“I think you work yourself far too hard, Mr. Master Shipbuilder, darling.”  
He laughed freely, suddenly unrestrained by frustration as thus was her power, and kissed the back of her hand with warm lips, keeping her fingers in his hand as he stared down at them as if they were a miracle of God.  
“You really should go, Young Rose, before someone catches you.” He stood from his seat, gripping her arms, rubbing them up and down in a last effort to keep his touch in the forefront of her mind. “But I promise I will see you later.” 

Rose smiled, standing on her toes to kiss him, holding his face in her delicate hands so she may never forget how he felt. She could feel him smile against her lips as he pulled away, knowing in his heart of hearts that his resolve was weak yet and he would not be able to unhand her should she persist. He laced their fingers together, bringing her to the door and pressed his lips to hers one last time before he swung open the door, stroking her cheek in the kiss of a caress when she turned back to look at him, and closed the door with a contented sigh when she ran off down the hallway into the dying night. 

* * *

Rose grinned, warm from the core of her soul even as she stepped from the safety of the ship into the bitter wind upon the decks, the dawn light still in its infancy.

Everywhere she looked upon this ship she saw Thomas Andrews, as if on every square inch was his name plastered in big letters just as _Titanic’s_ name was on her stern. Whether she looked at the rails or the funnels or the promenade deck, she saw him sitting comfortably just behind her eyes, ever-present and warm. As she gazed on everything there was upon which to be gazed, she imagined him sitting at a desk in Belfast, a half-finished blueprint in front of him, holding a pen before his puzzled face. She could see him tapping the back of the pen to his frowning lips, rubbing his calloused fingers across a tense temple or a furrowed brow, thinking as hard as one possibly could. And then, she could see the flame alighting in his beautiful noir eyes as he started in his stool, for the idea finally came to him; that enthusiastic, bright smile stretching on his lips as he leaned over to the paper and drew with vigor the plan for the next part of his ship that suddenly made sense to his ingenious mind, the very part that showed itself real before her. 

Her Thomas was within this ship, as if he had ripped his very veins from his body and intertwined them in the soul of _Titanic_ like wires to lights. And how lucky was she that this renowned genius, the god of this little universe, kissed her and her alone. Whatever service she had paid to the world to receive this golden man she would never understand. But if it was her suffering through a life for seventeen years which had never felt her own that was the pulling of the rope tied around his heart to hers, closing the distance, she would gladly live it again five-hundred lifetimes over if only she would find her way back to Thomas Andrews again at the end of it all.

Rose buried her cheeks, flaming even in the bitter cold, in the fur of her coat, pulling it tighter around her slight frame in hopes that she might cement his being, his love, to her body forever so that she may never be parted from him. As she walked carefully and slowly against this beloved ship that she loved more than anyone else save him, she observed the thin orange line wainscotting the horizon. First light was coming, and as she made her way back to the First-Class entrance she admired the strokes of God’s paintbrush in dazzling pinks and oranges and yellows, the ancestor to the day’s sun and blue sky. How beautiful it was! And such beauty was only heightened by the new sensations coursing through her of the night which preceded it.  
She knew within an instant that it was the most beautiful sunrise she had ever seen. 

But what she did not know, what she could not have known, was that it was the final time the _RMS Titanic_ would bear witness to the dawn before darkness became her eternal friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it! 
> 
> Finally, am I right? 
> 
> Forgive me, I haven't written a proper love scene in a VERY long time and I think I've lost my touch, but I will practice and hopefully, the next one (yes, there will be more ;) ) will be better! 
> 
> Here is the link to my chat with Victor Garber! Try not to laugh too hard at my fangirling, haha! <3 
> 
> https://youtu.be/sgOy4VezYds
> 
> Thank you for your patience and I beg your forgiveness for my absence.
> 
> Until next time (which shan't be so terribly long, I promise!),
> 
> \- Micayla <3


	11. Of Keys and Implicitness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ruth confronts her daughter, keys lock and unlock doors, and Rose DeWitt Bukater bears all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am simply the _worst!_
> 
> I said to you, my darlings, that I would not leave you bereft as long as I did last time, and look what I did! 
> 
> Please forgive me. The holidays have been busy, busy, busy and my writer's block has been relentless, relentless, relentless. 
> 
> Also, my darlings, 1300 READS? Oh, how I adore all of you. Thank you so, so, so, so very much. You make the slaying of my incessant block so very worth it. 
> 
> This chapter is awfully short (and to me, as always, wholly unsatisfying) but I worked hard to get to you something worthwhile and I hope that it is. 
> 
> Please enjoy, my sweet darlings.

** _Sunday,_ 14 April 1912 **

Dawn passed by and lucent, young sunlight percolated through the leadlight windows of the First-Class Dining Saloon. It made the walls a stark, nearly painful white and set the green of the dining chairs alight like a mystical emerald from a storybook Rose remembered reading as a girl.  
It was in this very room that she stood, rigid, flanked by her mother and Cal, surveilled upon by Lovejoy’s scrutinizing eye as if she were a most dangerous prisoner and he the ward, ever on guard for her escape attempts.  
The night before, her wings had been stretched and worked as they had been denied for so long. And now, back in the clutches of reality, she felt them being wrenched down again, seized like a criminal by her mother, the pain made crueler by the identity of the executor so that the ache within her was not purely corporeal.

As the minutes passed by, she felt the strength to remain stoic escape her. She was sure she would have had silent and unnoticed tears streaming down her cheeks had the doors not opened halfway through the service and Thomas stepped in, bumbling to shove his notebook within his inner pocket. He looked and nodded apologetically at the stares of the mechanically punctual, judging him for daring to be something as imperfect as a human and step a foot out of place. The only free chair was on the aisle directly across from her, which would have been occupied by Lady Duff-Gordon had she not been taken ill with a headache that morning, her husband said. Rose begged God silently to forgive her for rejoicing in Lady Lucille’s malady.

As Captain Smith—standing statuesque at the front of the room, medals glowing pridefully on his breast—led the mass into a pontifical rendition of _Eternal Father, Strong to Save,_ Rose’s lips moved, the words escaping her as they surged from her memory. Her eyes slowly drifted across the floor to Thomas standing just feet away, his voice lost in the melange of many. She swept her gaze from the spats upon his boots to his formally dressed figure and the face whose eyes watched her, waiting patiently for unification with hers. The phantasm of his naked body, trembling in the aftermath of their consummation, sheened with sweat, gleaming gold in the candlelight of his stateroom came just behind her eyes, ripping through the true sight of him like a radiograph. Her cheeks burned as she dared keep his observance, ignorant as it was of what was flowing through her head like a rushing river: thoughts of a most inappropriate magnitude that Rose was sure her mother would be apoplectic and die right in that room had Ruth DeWitt Bukater been given the gift of reading the minds of others.  
It would be a fitting demise, she thought, for her mother to die before all those she had dedicated her life to impressing. _They would never forget her then._

But what Rose was too dazed to notice was that Thomas’s thoughts were taking the same course of the same rushing river; faded and misty wraiths, achromatic and silent like a motion picture of her in his arms—bare, flushed, weak in the heat of release.  
He was not a forward man, not often. He had grown like ivy against a stone cottage, passionless and halfway unwanted, into the armor suit of propriety required for rubbing elbows with the most refined breed society had to offer. Learned with great difficulty and practice was the skill of sequestering his sentiments and inclinations until he was alone to think them freely.  
After all—he had never known how or why—the elites seemed to possess a certain prerogative power to know when one was being perverse even within the confines of their own head. 

Nonetheless, this girl, standing so primly across from him, had plucked that very power from him just as easily as she had whisked her fairy fingers into his chest and coaxed his heart from within, taking it with a whisper of a kiss to his cheek as a promise of its utmost care. His cheeks grew as red as the hair pinned behind her ears, fastened with that damned butterfly comb which had glinted in the firelight the previous night, just before she bore herself to him for the first time, spread out on the divan he had contrived himself.  
And how ignorant he had been then, when he had done so. When he sat stout upon his stool in Harland and Wolff’s drafting offices, sketching with great inspired strokes _Titanic's_ first elements, his life followed the same ceaseless course, bereft of portents or _rarae aves._ From one day to the next he could predict each event down to the very second they occurred and it was awfully rare that he was ever incorrect. Back then, he had been resting upon the edge of a great abyss with the future of the world with _Titanic_ lying just below. All he had to do was throw himself over to be cemented into history, his name forever intertwined with the watershed that was her existence.  
And yet, that would not even be the best of all his ship would bring to him; not the recognition of a talent and passion which truly separated him from all the rest of his kind, nor the divine euphoria of seeing his beloved brainchild real and functioning before his eyes.  
No, it was what he had received _within_ her. The greatest joy and honor of all was holding Rose DeWitt Bukater in his arms, being her guide through her breakthrough to womanhood and igniting his dream of being her deliverer from oppression. 

And with this honor granted to him by the powers that be, whether it was the universe or God or some other Being yet to be discovered, they were afforded the ability to sink within themselves, giving creation to a sanctuary where no one else could touch them. But yet, another, crueler world remained beyond their shelter, and the people who lived in it still roamed and interfered and invaded. But they did not care to think about that world, not then, and because of it, they failed to observe Ruth staring daggers into their backs, the blades flaming and their flesh a prime target.

_O hear us when we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea!_

* * *

As the DeWitt Bukaters and Cal walked forth from the saloon into the late morning air, crisp with an early Atlantic spring cold still shaking off the iron embrace of winter, Rose’s face remained unchanged. She hardly cared to notice how her mother was anomalously quiet, absent of even the snobbish talk of one of the ladies’ frocks being creased or out of fashion or a man being too coarse in his attentions. She should have noticed, but she did not, for her mind spoke only the language of her love of Thomas Andrews, and the only thought that remained important to her was the golden clock behind her eyes, ticking down the seconds until she would see him again.

But Rose _did_ notice when her mother brutally yanked her arm, startling her off course so that she stumbled ponderously until they were ensconced in a cove of walls on the starboard boat deck. One look into Ruth’s eyes quieted any piqued protest as efficiently as if she had taken a needle and thread to her lips and sewn them shut. Her mother was angry, unbidden by the straight-backed, poised disappointment custom to the upper classes. Her eyes were a flaming red, her face pink with passionate emotion, and breath released sharply from her nose, wrinkled as her features twisted into a snarl.

“Mother, w-what in the world—”  
“You do not get to speak,” she snapped. “You have no right to speak with the way you seek to disobey and discredit both of us.”  
Rose furrowed her brow. “What? What in the world do you mean?”  
“Do you think I didn’t see it?” Ruth’s voice now adopted that sort of quiet, that whisper of wind, smooth and graceful that was more intimidating and terrifying to Rose than if she were to shout at the top of her lungs. “Do you think everyone did not see the way you were looking at Andrews and the way he was looking at you?” 

Her daughter said nothing, bereft of speech, caught red-handed like a thief holding the stolen bread in his hands. Her shoulders sunk and her eyes diverted to the wooden decks of the ship beneath her feet. She tried so desperately not to remember that his presence was embedded in every single centimeter of _Titanic,_ that he was surrounding them like a phantom even then.

“You are an _embarrassment_ to me, Rose,” Ruth hissed, her eyes wide and shining. “I told you as women our choices are not easy, but the difference between us is that I bear my duty the way I should because I care what important people have to say. I know the weight their words carry. I was not selfish as you are, brandishing a youthful dalliance as if it is something to be lauded. I knew my duty and obeyed it. I truly don’t know where I went wrong. Please tell me when and where I did, for I care to know just how my daughter learned to be a willful slut.”

If her mother had thrown her overboard into the cold ocean waves or taken a knife and stabbed her and slit her throat, Rose was sure she would have felt less pain. Trained in the elitist stoicism required of her and the apathy she adopted simply to irritate her mother and Cal though she was, Rose could not help the tears pricking her eyes nor her heart swelling in throbbing anguish until she felt the stays against her quivering flesh would burst. All on _Titanic’s_ decks would then be free to see her bleeding soul, skinned alive by the woman who was supposed to love and protect her more than anyone else.  
She did not speak, she could not. The blood rushing frigid within her head and the burning of her bosom was too much to bear, and words became foreign. Her wide eyes simply stared ahead as her mother clasped a cold hand around her milky white wrist and dragged her like a rag doll in the direction of their suite, like a lunatic being forced back into solitary confinement, not to be trusted. So raw was this pain, so immense was the aching within her at her mother’s gaping wound, that she did not see Thomas Andrews staring amongst the blind, his twinkling brown eyes following them and his ears privy to every word that had been spoken.

* * *

The room was dark, cloaked by mahoganies, the golds glowing dimly in the absence of a fire in the hearth, and the only source of light poured in from the promenade. The beauty of the endless ocean glinted with a multitude of bewitching winks, unknowing as it was of its dear friend’s anguish. Rose tripped over her feet as Ruth whipped her around like a useless toy, throwing her in the room and shutting the door. She felt dizzy, cursed with an evil queasiness as her mother advanced on her, stiff and prim.

“Have you _nothing_ to say for yourself?”

Rose merely looked at her, her mouth sealed with a silencing epoxy, eyes flooding and her bottom lip trembling with tears she could not emotionally bear to let free. And silence was the one response Ruth could not tolerate, for it was the absence of denial and the negation of promises to change and obey. She raised her hand and struck it across her daughter’s cheek before she could process the thought.  
She pushed away the remorse and maternal instinct that seethed inside of her and admonished her silently when Rose cried out sharply with pain, emotional and physical, felt and endured, and her hand reached to her abused flesh, trying to give unto it a comforting affection from a mother to a child she knew she did not have from her own.  
Ruth DeWitt Bukater refused to let anyone, most of all her disobedient daughter, see any trace of regret or sympathy in her countenance. She spun Rose around, still pliant as clay, and pushed her into her room, hardly giving her one last look before she slammed the door shut.  
The sound of the pins engaging within the lock felt like a dreaded finality to Rose. It was the final forging of the last layer of a wall, literal and figurative, between her and her mother that she feared would never be able to be dismantled. Her mother had chosen wealth and appearance, all things fickle and material over her daughter, and the key in the lock manipulated by her own hands on the other side of the door was evidence enough of that. Her knees gave way and she fell to the floor in tears.

“You may come out when you learn to understand that there is no future with you and the shipbuilder. You _will_ marry Hockley, and you will do it without complaint. And until you accept that as a woman must, you will not eat and you will not step forth from that room.”

From beyond was heard the shuffling of her mother’s skirts and the opening of the suite door. Then, a pause, as she adorned herself in a mantle of mirage, in a protection from eyes capable of seeing her weakness without effort. After a moment, it closed again and Rose was left the only soul in the suite, uncared for and unheard.

* * *

Rose did not know how much time passed; she could not bear to look at the clock, for if she did, she would be reminded that through what she lived _was_ real life; her mother _had_ abandoned her, she _was_ still chained to a life she repulsed, and the man she truly cared for would be separated from her forever in three days when _Titanic_ docked in New York City.  
The only intimation that time had passed was her tears running dry and tired, when all she could do was heave for fruitless breath. She inhaled, but she did not truly breathe; she was alive of the flesh but dead in every other regard, of heart and of mind and of hope, and it appeared there was no bringing her back to life.

When she heard keys jingling, a most beautiful canorous chink that fell on punished ears, she rushed to her vanity, desperate to be rid of any traces of her vincibility. She recoiled at the sight.  
Most of her hair had slipped free from the chignon at the back of her head to fall in artless coils in every direction, the powder and light rouge upon her cheeks had given way to streaks of godforsaken tears, and her eyes were lined red as if someone had cut through her ducts and let spill forth all that resided there, saltwater and blood in one united front.  
She figured she looked like some sort of frightful clown, unique to the nightmares of small children with fervid imaginations and of the very aristocrats with whom she was at odds, their hellish imagining of all that a proper girl should not be, that in their lotusland could only be seen in the depths and clutches of sleep to be talked over the next day in scandalized tones as they sipped tea from garnished cups, their every desire fulfilled and appeased not a moment after they thought it.

Her cold and lifeless fingers smeared across her face, trying in vain to restore some normalcy, to blanket over the tracks upon her face with the snow of her skin. The door opened and she stood up straight, trembling as if she had lost all her lifeblood, attempting to put on an unconvincing masquerade. She was fearful of what she would see, of what cruel words her mother would bear after the idea of it all simmered within her head, after she was reminded anew of her daughter’s sin by mingling with the very same who formed the oppression in which Rose suffered, and she winced and tensed in anticipation.  
But she did not see her mother, nor Cal with that disgusted snarl across his face, and she did not even see Lovejoy, slimy smirk upon his lip as if he always knew something she did not and was ten steps ahead of her in intellect.  
She saw Thomas with a ring of golden keys hanging from his wrist, his chest rising and falling in a relieved sigh as he was permitted sight of her.

“Thomas. Oh, good gracious. Oh, _Thomas,”_ she ran forward, not caring how she looked, not caring what consequences would come should someone see them, and she threw herself into his arms with enough force to send the tall man stumbling. But, as he always did, he wrapped his arms around her slight frame and steadied her, engulfing her in safety she knew in nobody and from nothing else.  
“I...I thought myself a superstitious fool for making copies of all the keys for all the rooms on the ship before the voyage, but I thank God above now that I did,” he spoke into her hair, pressing a kiss to the fiery tresses which seemed to dullen and glow a soft orange ember of defeat instead of the blaze of rebellion and spirit.  
“Oh, God, Thomas, it was so awful. You have no idea what terrible things Mother said to me after the service, I-I—”  
“I know,” he replied, with a soothing caress to her hair. “I heard her. I was standing nearby and I just...I had to see you, to make sure you were alright, and when she arrived at luncheon without you I just knew...I...I never imagined her doing this.”  
“Please,” she whispered, shaking her head into his chest, his blue shirt already soaked through with tears. “Take me away from here.”

She meant more than just what the words would suggest, he knew. He knew she wanted to be set free from the course on which his _Titanic_ was being taken, that she wanted to be liberated from the future that followed her like a shadow, to be relieved of the pain and disappointment that almost all the people she loved and trusted had placed on her. He had every desire to do all these things, to be the purveyor and reason of why Rose DeWitt Bukater was, for once, happy in earnest. But all he could manage at that very moment was to take her from that dreaded room that had transmuted into a sudden prison, and from it he guided her with the gentle arms of an angel pulling her to the afterlife.

* * *

A hot cup of tea, searing a pinching pain to her skin in which she delighted, was held in Rose’s delicate fingers as she sat upon the divan in Thomas’s suite. How different she felt then sitting in that very place than she did the night before; then, she felt she could have conquered the world, and now she felt that the world had turned around and retaliated, army twice as numerous as before, and had beaten her to nothing, pulled her limbs from her body and placed her head upon a spike for all the rest of the universe to laugh upon.

“She’s chosen them over me,” she spoke, her eyes downcast into the warm liquid dancing around the walls of the cup as it trembled in her hands. “She’s chosen everyone else, even Cal, over her own daughter. I suppose I should hate her, but…”  
There were no words he could speak, no logic his mechanical brain could follow, as for once mind and heart were not in tandem. All he could do was reach a warm, calloused hand and stroke a stray, tired tear from her abused cheek.  
“I have no choice but to marry him now, I...What other choice do I have?” It was rhetorical and yet he answered.  
“There is always a choice, Young Rose. I told you that. It’s the consequences that we do not want to face that makes it seem like the choice is not there.”  
“But what else would I do? What should I do, Thomas?”  
He shook his head, taking one of her hands in his own. He willed his warmth and hope to be shed unto her, even if it meant his death.  
If he could make her happy, then he should die just the same.  
“I cannot answer that, Young Rose. This is your life and I will not seek to influence it. I would be no better than they are if I tried.”

Rose’s brow furrowed and she placed the teacup onto the table and rushed forward into his arms, her hands coming around the small of his back, his heartbeat thundering beneath her ear just as it had that morning. _What peace we had known then…_

“I wish it could be you,” she said without thinking, the words spilling as freely and as surely as ink from the nib of a pen. “I wish I could marry _you._ I wish I had met _you_ in London and not Cal."  
He chuckled gently. "I don't know _what_ I would have been doing in _London_ of all places so close to the voyage."  
She tried to smile, but it quickly fell under the weight of her strain. "I wish _we_ were getting married in Philadelphia. No. I would marry you in _your_ home, in Ireland.”  
"You’d marry me in Ireland?” He was humoring her; he hardly thought her truthful, not from maliciousness but from grief, and he assumed her words to be comforting causeries conjured from enmity no matter how much he wanted them to be true. “Really, Young Rose? I thought you’d like to be married back home.”  
“I don’t care. I’d travel to the smallest island in the world, uninhabited, deserted and festering with dangerous creatures and I’d stand on its sands happily if it meant I’d marry you there.”

She rose from him, sitting so close she could hear his breath, shaking with each rise and fall, his eyes singing the song of the mahogany walls. Her words came out in no more than a whisper as her hand danced along his cheek. “I wish it could be you. You would never hurt me. You would always be good to me. Oh, Thomas...I want to marry _you.”_

 _I love you._ She hoped desperately that he could hear it behind her words like an echo. She implored that her eyes shone a shade of blue clear enough that it could display her devotion, and that he knew by pure intuition of a human who loved that was loved in return that she did, indeed, love him.  
And he did.

_He did._

Thomas understood her, all of a sudden. These were not impulsively summoned words. He felt the underlying meaning of all she said like a bud resting beneath the earth, and it sunk into his skin like the most glorious lifeblood he ever possessed. He felt renewed, he felt alive, he felt cherished like he never had before, not when he got married, not when his talents were acknowledged and he was commissioned to build the grandest ship in the world. No sounds could form on his tongue, no letters nor syllables, and his mouth opened and closed. He was rendered mute, all in the name of viscous, rushing adoration; pure, true love as neither of them has ever known and both figured they never would again.

“When the ship docks, I’m getting off with you,” Rose whispered with the certitude of a decision made.  
“This is crazy,” he enunciated with a breathless laugh of disbelief and happiness, his lips twisted into a great smile, his eyes round and dumbfounded.  
“I know! It doesn’t make any sense!” She giggled, as if they were children, plotting some jejune sort of scheme and imagining it stage by stage in pictorial fantasies. “That’s why I trust it.”

He could bear the emptiness, the bereftness no longer, and his arms swarmed her, pulling her warm and so very alive body to his, feeling with the first brush of their skin that he was his true self again.  
The sight flashed before his eyes, them hand in hand to the shock and horror and protest of Mr. Hockley and Mrs. DeWitt Bukater, marching out onto the ready and unknowing streets of New York, lovers against all odds and expectations. There was a sort of frisson within the air in the idea, as if this new dry earth, this new world all its own, was ready to appease their rebellion in a way the previous never could.

It only made sense that his beloved _Titanic_ was the bridge to the truest happiness he would ever know.

And with this thought flowing in his head, Thomas swept her into his arms, carrying her as he imagined he would one day over the threshold of their home, she his wife.  
_“Thank you,”_ it was with this faint whisper and a soft smile to the silent partitions of _Titanic_ that he placed her on his bed and with the first touch of his lips to hers, the expectant world with which they were finally severing all ties ceased to exist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it, my darlings. 
> 
> I know I left you bereft of a love scene but it's not the last chance for one, I promise. ;)
> 
> I would like to say that I will be back here before Christmas and New Year's like days past, but I cannot promise and I doubt it, knowing how I've been of late. 
> 
> So, in that case, I wish you such happy holidays and a very, very Merry Christmas, and may this new year be happier and easier on us all. It was not an easy year, but all of you, this story, and Victor Garber are my highlights. Your support, reads, and comments have all brought me to happy tears and excited jumps and jigs. You made a miserable quarantine worth it in the end and I love you all. SO very much. 
> 
> I hope to be back here sooner and that Christmas may give me some inspiration, but if this is the last we meet in 2020, Happy New Year! I can't wait to see you in 2021! 
> 
> All my dearest, sincerest love, 
> 
> -Micayla <3


	12. Of Warmth and Premonitions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rose and Thomas make a stand, Ruth and Rose altercate, Molly Brown talks sense, and Thomas Andrews dreads.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, my sweet darlings, and Happy New Year!
> 
> I hope your holidays were absolutely wonderful! I'm so glad to finally share my first chapter of 2021 with you! 
> 
> As I publish this we are at 1599 hits. I'm in shock. I cannot believe we have made it this far. I'm so grateful and so humbled by all of you sticking around for now 12 chapters. I hope I continue to satisfy you with what I write. That is all I can ask for.
> 
> We're nearing troubling times now in our timeline. Better enjoy the calm while it lasts!
> 
> Enjoy, darlings!

** Sunday, 14 April 1912 **

Thomas had never been one for warmth.

Ever since he had been a child, he preferred the winter to the summer, when the thick, woolen clothes in numerous layers against one’s body served purpose rather than annoyance and discomfort.  
Walking on the decks of _Titanic,_ lost in thought with the nib of his pen scratching away with inscriptions he did not hear in the forefront of his mind, was comfortable for him. Simultaneously, the rest of the passengers clutched for their shawls and coats, shivering, complaining to their companions of a bite in the air he failed to notice.

And yet, despite this love of cold, he could safely say there was no better feeling upon his skin than the swirling, rousing warmth that filled his chamber after he made love to Rose. 

Once they fell back upon his bed, heaving for breath, coated generously with perspiration, it surrounded them like an embrace; their love embodied, celebrated, congratulated. He shut his eyes against the onslaught of blissful sensation, holding his beloved Rose to his side as she drew senseless shapes and words across the expanse of his chest, rising and falling rapidly, his lungs admonishing him. 

“What time is it?” He felt her voice vibrate just above his heart.  
“Nearly six,” he replied, with a crane of the neck and a spy of the face of the clock.  
“An hour until dinner,” she said. “I’d like to go.”  
The determination in her voice had him shifting abruptly and her leaning on one arm to hover over him. When their eyes met, he could see in her gaze that she meant it.  
“Rose, is that wise? You know your mother will be there, as will Mr. Hockley. By now, your mother will have known that you escaped, and I credit her with being smart enough not to have to think very hard about where you’ve gone.”  
“I don’t care,” she said. “I want to make a stand. I won’t live any sort of life hiding from what I eventually have to face. I know what I want, and I know what I’m going to do. I’m getting off this ship with you, and that is the beginning and end of everything. No use hiding and pretending to be ashamed of it.” 

And thus he found himself nestled in one of those few moments in life when no words will do to limn your thoughts; a wordless type of feeling that hardly any are blessed to perceive, and one that he had hitherto felt with Rose one million times over.  
He did not try to do battle with it. He allowed it to wash over him, for he knew she understood if he knew nothing else, and his gaze danced from her shining eyes to her swollen pink lips, up and down and back again like a machine, twirling a stubborn strand of fire from her temple.  
Ever graceful, she caught his wrist in his ministrations, quick, like a lion upon its prey. Raising it to her, she let her supple cheek caress across his rugged knuckles. He sucked in a breath when she then brought his fingers before her lips, her eyes flicking to his for a moment before her lids fell like dusk upon the afternoon sky. She kissed each of his fingertips, calloused and undeserving as they were, so slowly so that he could feel with each one the clefts in the flesh of her lips and every hairsbreadth of their motion. 

“How amazing it is to me that these are the hands that forged history, and yet they choose to touch me, too,” Rose spoke with a breathy voice, smooth like the most passionate actress of the stage amid the most concupiscent love scene. And just like her fellow actor, wholeheartedly in love with her character, Thomas fell, hovering, gravity and sense forgotten. 

And no words could thus come to him once again. Nor could the thought or desire to speak, for the touch of her warm fingers to his face sent away his logical mind. She pressed her lips thrice to his brow, her breath falling in an ethereal fog over him. Her lithe hands combed back his hair, stroking his forehead as a young girl would the most delicate silken dress, ever in awe of the softness no matter how many times she repeated the sweep of a touch that remained unaltered but always felt like the very first.

“And even _more_ amazing, this is the brain that thought her up, her and her every little minute detail, and the thought of me somehow finds a place as well.” 

Staying still was impossible now, for not only did this shower of praise feel entirely undeserved as most that came to him did, but the yearning to touch her was like a bolt of electricity to his limbs, and it could not be ignored. Thomas seized her within his arms, ever gentle, and laid her down to the sheets and pillows, scrutinizing her with the eyes of a lover instead of the eyes of an architect. With these eyes, a curve of her unequal to another went unnoticed; the different shades of orange and red in her hair were the same; she did not have to be neatly assembled to be perfect in his eyes. Not like a ship, not like _Titanic,_ to whom he dedicated four years of his life without respite in the pursuit of her flawlessness. How unfamiliar the sensation, and yet how he embraced it like it were always apart of him.  
A small, chaste kiss was pressed to her lips, and like ambrosia it was, giving unto him renewed life with so easy an action. He let his mouth press more to her from her cheeks and her jaw, down her neck and to her chest where he made home. The breadth of it was vast, and he left no single inch untouched or unattended, and as he kissed deeply just above her left breast, he felt the quick thudding fighting back against him like the heart of a hummingbird. 

“No, Young Rose. The truly amazing thing is that this heart,” he pressed another kiss, “found it within itself to forgive me in all my foolish folly and chose somehow still to feel the same way about a man who is far below her and even farther below deserving her in any sense.” 

The wordless feeling now overtook _her,_ and she could do nothing but smile down at him, this man she loved so very much but was still too afraid to say so. Her fingers smoothed through the silvering hair atop his head once more, a feature that would in anyone else be an antipathic warning of their differences, of his more than twenty years on her, and yet with every stroke, she felt herself loving it more, loving _him_ more than she ever had. And when his lips found themselves wrapped around her embonpoint, with a final sharp inhale of breath, she forgot about life as a whole, about their differences and the challenges they were yet to face and let herself fall into his passionate embrace. 

* * *

Indeed, Thomas did not mind warmth.

He did not mind now even the stickiness of his layers of evening dress, the humidity of his still soaked skin flowing like a sultry summer evening, as he walked to the First Class Dining Saloon, Rose in a deep blue evening gown beside him. Her mutual warmth collided with his and they forged together. He could not help but imagine it as their suit of armor, their ever reminder that their love, despite whatever harrowing circumstances lay ahead or around them, remained just beneath the exoteric surface. 

He paused a reasonable distance away, pulling her nearly beneath the Grand Staircase hidden from all else.  
“Are you certain you want to do this, Young Rose? It might turn out to be far more painful than you’re anticipating.” His features were twisted in concern: concern for her amid a battle in their shared war that was none of his own. She marveled at him.  
“Yes, I’m certain. As I said, I know what I’m doing. I’m getting off _Titanic_ with you, and that is the beginning and end of _everything.”_ Rose let her gloved fingers take his and ghost them over her breast right where her heart was pounding, weaker beyond the walls of his bedroom and in, he knew, trepidation of what was to come no matter how strong her front, but that remained strong nonetheless, as a reminder that it indeed was his. 

He feared for the spectacle of them so close and touching as they were, but with one look on the unobserving crowd—gliding across the floor in shining boots and sparkling skirts, chattering tightly—he found that their hands were hidden between their bodies, private in even so public a setting. 

He smiled down at her, his Darling, _Darling_ Girl, before he lifted his eyes to the masses again.  
“We ought to part here. There’s no use in being completely careless even if we are obvious, and I feel walking in together would be just that. I’ll go in first, and I’ll wait for you.”  
Rose did not respond and only squeezed his hand in a silent protest, like a fearful young child left alone. He pressed back in as comforting a gesture as he could manage.  
“I will see you there, Young Rose.”  
He unhanded her silently, for if he had held on for an additional moment, he would have not been able to walk away at all. He would have been seduced with the siren song of the desire to walk in with her hand and hand, brazen and bold beyond courage and rife with stupidity and recklessness.

Upon his first step within the door, he was flanked by Ismay and Colonel Gracie, spewing their usual pleasantries that were conjured from nowhere but machine-like memory. He walked with them with grace, nearly as mechanical as they but not entirely, for his ability to turn into a machine was always marred by his sheer humility.

He parted with them after some minutes with a polite nod as he always did, making his rounds to as many as he could before dinner truly commenced, greeting all within his reach with a warm smile, inquiring about their voyage and making mental notes of their critiques and brushing off humbly their onslaughts of commendation. 

His joviality was killed when he saw Mrs. DeWitt Bukater walking in on the arm of Cal Hockley. As if knowing he was there, her eyes immediately fell to him. She visibly straightened, her features turning hard and taught so that if she did not already resemble a wax statue of a woman, she certainly did then. He gave her a nod in greeting to which he received no response, only the slow drag of the eyes back away from him as all the confirmation he needed to know that he had been correct in his assumption of her wit.  
With a painful swallow in too tight a throat, he straightened his clothes and made his way to his chair, all of a sudden feeling as though everyone in the entire saloon could see the sweat still upon his skin and the purple love-bruises littering his chest. Reaching up, he straightened his stiff collar anew, tightening his tie on his throat until he could feel it uncomfortably digging into his larynx. 

Thomas did not look at Rose when she entered; he stared absently down at the empty plate before him, memorizing every detail upon the silverware and canvassing it for any sign of blemish for once without any ounce of care behind it. He swore inwardly when he realized she would be sitting beside him, and he eyed her mother to his right in the now-empty channel between them that would soon be blocked by the very person over whom they were waging so bitter a conflict.  
He felt almost like the daughter’s husband whom her parents despise, whom upon they wish a terrible death behind closed doors and to whom they spare no biting remark in his presence. A pain almost shot into his heart at the idea when he remembered the word “husband.” 

_No, I would marry you in your home, in Ireland. I’d travel to the smallest island in the world, uninhabited, deserted and festering with dangerous creatures and I’d stand on its sands happily if it meant I’d marry you there. Oh, Thomas, I want to marry you. I’m getting off this ship with you, and that’s the beginning and end of everything._

They flooded his mind violently, those words spoken in the whisper of memory upon only his internal ears. All too suddenly, he was reminded of his place, his purpose, and he straightened in his chair— _his_ chair, in more than one sense of the word—with a renewed confidence as Rose appeared beside him. 

She bore no greeting to her mother as she sat, taking her serviette and placing it on her lap, her back parallel to the chair, her chin raised. She nearly matched her mother in dourness, though she lacked the years her mother had possessed to perfect it, and her real self bled through like wine to cloth. But curiosity festered in her until she could handle it no more, and she dared turn her head and lock eyes with Ruth, ice upon ice and her gaze nearly as cold as the very same. Rose knew her own eyes to hold some sort of begging for reconciliation, and her mother without a single moment of hesitation slashed through it with her gaze like a sword, her injury insulted by the view of her fiancé leaning one elbow upon the table with a single finger across his top lip, his condescending disappointment poorly concealed.  
But she would not let tears come. She would not let her mother and much less Cal see her weak. She reached a blind hand to her left, searching for Thomas’s hand, and found it without so much as a second try. She was astounded when he willingly laced their fingers together, and she was even more surprised when that was all that was needed to catapult her back from the brink. 

* * *

To their credit, they bore the whole affair well. 

Ruth DeWitt Bukater was nothing if not relentless, and she glared upon them until it had the entire table intrigued and yet too afraid of something as horrifying as a breach of politesse to ask what unpleasantness had arisen between them. Rose damned them all for being astute this night out of any.  
Molly, however, Savior that she was, soon encapsulated the group with a regaling of one of her tales with all her improper enthusiasm, and even the two Forbidden Lovers under Scrutiny found it within themselves to laugh in earnest. They knew from the good lady’s gaze that she had surmised what had occurred, and they both thanked her with their own for her kindness to them.

Mrs. Brown had ridden the dinner of some of its torture, and when it concluded, it took everything within Rose not to rise with the men and run from the room so that she may not be drowned in it again, prompted and seduced back with this shift in circumstance. When Thomas unlaced their hands, warm and stiff from contact, she would have cried out if she had an ounce less of control than she still did over herself. She thanked God when Cal let the room without a single word but was dismayed and felt as if she were hanging with one finger over the edge of an abyss when Molly abandoned her as well.  
And no matter how many times she had rehearsed the sound in her head like an actress just before the curtain rose, she could not help digging her fingernails into her clothed and stockinged knees in dread when she heard the shift of fabric as Ruth moved to sit in Thomas’s chair. There was an allegorical sort of remonstrance behind the action that Rose chose not to acknowledge. 

“Well, are you delighted with yourself? Are you prepared now to end this charade?” Had the venom within her mother’s voice been true to life, Rose was sure she would have seized and perished right in her seat.  
“What charade, Mother? If you mean myself and Mr. Andrews, I won’t sit here and deny it like it doesn’t exist, but don’t call it a charade. I love him, and love isn’t a charade. I won’t let you mock it.”  
Ruth scoffed. “What did I tell you before? You don’t _love_ Mr. Andrews, you foolish child! You only want to—”  
“—I only want to upset you,” Rose interposed. “Yes, I know what you think. But I know my own mind better than you do, no matter what you want to believe, Mother, and I know my love for him isn’t a ploy to rebel against you. You may wish me to be heartless, but I am not as heartless as that.”  
“You’ve _convinced_ yourself that you love him, you mean. Do not mistake your delusion for reality. Nobody can love anybody after three days, Rose. You’re lying to yourself if you think that. And if you think Mr. Hockley and I, not to even mention Mrs. Andrews, will not protest to this tryst, you’re far stupider than I already assume.”  
Her daughter faltered in her resolve for the briefest minute, still weak beyond all possible armor to her aspersions. “Go ahead. Insult me all you like. Think me stupid if you wish. But the fact remains, I am getting off this ship with Thomas, and you _will not stop me._ I won’t be told how to live my life, and I certainly won’t live it for the benefit of anyone else, least of all you who has shown me so very clearly that I am nothing more than a puppet in your game of airs. If anyone does not love anyone here, it is _you_ who does not love _me.”_

Rose would have delighted in the coating of her mother’s eyes with genuine tears if her vision were not already blurred, her own words the knife to her skin, and she was sat flayed, her heart cracking to pieces with the revelation of truth brought with it. 

“How _dare_ you speak to me like that. I am your _mother_ and you will _respect_ me!” 

There were no insistences of love, no attempts to refute what she had said, and with the absence of both, Rose felt her heart shut off to Ruth, and for the briefest of time, her pain went blank. 

“You are _not_ my daughter. I don’t know _who_ you are.” 

With her words, Ruth stood, gripping her skirts and backing away as if her daughter were a poisonous creature and she was disgusted at the sight of her. She made her way back to the company of the Countess of Rothes and the other women she was so desperate to impress, and Rose was left, skinless, vulnerable, and aching of the heart. 

* * *

Thomas leaned over the railing of his beloved ship, watching the stark white ocean foam glow with the ship lights, seeing and unseeing all at once. He could not bear to think of Rose alone, fighting a battle unarmed against someone with such power over her and her thoughts. He squeezed the iron beneath his hands, distantly apologizing to _Titanic_ for handling her so roughly, and sighed his defeat to the witness of nobody but the sea. 

“Thomas.” A single, gentle call of his name had him whipping around, his senses agitated and oversensitive.  
“Molly,” he replied to the woman standing before him, confused and slightly afraid at seeing her face bereft of her mischievous smirk.  
“Are you all right?” There was no playful quip, and he deflated.  
“As alright as I can possibly be under the circumstances, I suppose. I’m assuming you know everything.”  
Molly gave a single terse nod. “Not everything, but a lot of it. I know you and Rose are in love with each other, and I know Ruth and Hockley don’t approve, not even close. Ruth told some of us girls at tea this afternoon that she had kept Rose in the suite, so you turned some heads when she came in, and Ruth was glarin’ at you like that. They may be blind, but I don’t think they’re _that_ blind. I think your secret’s out, sonny.”  
“Of course it is,” he muttered to no one in particular, and he fell over the rails again, hating his impoliteness at turning his back on a lady but loathe to let her see his distress. “I’ve been a fool, Molly.”  
“Yes, well, most people who are in love are fools. You’re no different from the rest of ‘em. The question is, what are you gonna do now?”  
“I don’t know. _I don’t know,”_ he said, gripping his hair in tightened fists. “What am I _supposed_ to do? She said she’s going to alight from _Titanic_ with me. She said she wishes she could marry me. And I want to marry her. I want to marry her so much I can _taste_ it, Molly. But the problem is when I’m with her, I forget that I’m already married, even if we are estranged, and she’s _due_ to be married, and if I let her do this, then every door of high society will be slammed in her face and they’ll never be opened again.”  
Thomas sighed, clenching his eyes shut for a moment.  
“Forgive me, please, Molly. These problems are not yours, and it is wrong of me to put them all on you. Forgive me.” 

Molly walked up to him slowly, placing a gloved hand upon his own, crossed in front of him in a false pretense of stoicism, and he nearly faltered. “Thomas Andrews, how long have I known ya? A long time. And in all that time, you’ve been nothin’ but selfless. You chat with folks until you’re ready to drop, you give your attention to anyone who asks for it, and you never allow yourself to accept that you are a genius who created a work of art and a piece of history. I’m glad for once in your life you dumped your woes on someone other than yourself.” 

With a deep breath, he unfolded his hands and enveloped hers, comforted like a child by his mother. “Yes, well, you are the only person I could ever do such a thing with.” 

She laughed, and her voice once again adopted her twang. “Well, I’m mighty pleased to hear that, Thomas. And chin up, now. You’ve got a wonderful lady at your side who loves ya. Actually, make that two, because you’ve got me, too. And I’ll entertain ya whenever ya come callin’, no matter what the rest of ‘em say. But you listen here. You better not muck it all up. You’ve spent too much of your life at the service of everyone else. This woman loves ya, and you love her, and that is the beginning and end of everything.” 

_I’m getting off this ship with you, and that’s the beginning and end of everything. This woman loves ya, and you love her, and that is the beginning and end of everything._

Thomas smiled despite himself, still weak of resolve, unsure of himself, but set alight by the combined spirit of Molly and Rose.  
“Yes. That is the beginning and end of everything.” He laughed softly, a rush of air through his nose. “Thank you, Molly. You’re my very dear friend, you know that.”  
“Yeah, I better be. I’d strike ya if you said anything otherwise.”  
“I would be disappointed if you did anything other,” he chuckled.  
Molly grinned, bright and kind. “Goodnight, Mr. Andrews.”  
He raised her hand to his lips and kissed the back of her palm, encasing her hand in his like the most delicate piece of china, and held it to him for a good many moments. “Goodnight, Molly.” 

When Molly Brown turned and left him, Thomas felt as if so much had been relived of him that he had forgotten how to hold himself. He held his beloved ship’s rails for purchase now as opposed to frustration and stroked his thumbs along her in a loving caress, more than a man to his creation but reminiscent of a connection far beyond any comparison. 

* * *

Rose scurried down the deck, her heels thudding against the wood and tears seeping down her cheeks. How familiar this felt, running without a place to go, feeling hopeless by something she could not be rid of other than facing it, which required a strength she did not have. She remembered how when last hopelessness had overtaken her like an infection, her life had nearly ended. And it would have, had it not been for Thomas. 

_Thomas._  
What a _fool_ she was! _He_ was her place to go. _He_ was her comfort in this world. _He_ was what she needed, and when she caught sight of him near the lifeboats where they had congregated that night after dancing their cares away, she collided herself with him with such force she let out a cry, and he stumbled backward and would have fallen overboard with her if the lifeboat had not been between them and the sea. 

_____ _

“Rose! God Almighty!” He cried as he wrapped his arms around her, burying her within the confines of his coat and pressing her to warmth against the bitter night.  
“Thomas, oh, God! She hates me. My mother _hates_ me. She said I was stupid, that this is all still a ploy to rebel. She told me I’m not her daughter anymore. She doesn’t understand! She doesn’t _understand!_ Oh, _Thomas!”_

_____ _

She sobbed into the fabric of his shirt that peeked through his dinner jacket and waistcoat, hot little pricks that soaked through his skin and made every hair upon him stand on end, useless in the face of her distress. He did not speak, for there was no need; there were no words he could speak that she did not already know, that he had not said one hundred times already, so he pressed his cheek to the crown of her head and held her until she tired. He did not fear for their capture, for the night was so bitterly cold that no one dared face the enemy that was the air, and she was so small and his coat so large that she was hidden from the unwanted eyes of anyone who would come across them. 

_____ _

“W-What are you holding?” She whimpered once her sobs had devolved into small quivering gasps for breath, seeing the object tucked beneath his arm, still safe from her charge.  
“Oh, this? Joughin baked me a loaf of bread,” he gave a small chuckle. “He said it was for me for being so kind to everyone.”  
Rose laughed weakly against him, and it reverberated just near his pounding heart. “You certainly deserve it. I ought to have baked you a loaf of bread for all you’ve done for me, but I don’t know how.”  
“Young Rose, you’ve given me much more than that already, and you know so.” He took her face within his hands, observing her rheumy eyes for a moment, brushing away her remaining tears with his thumbs and kissing her warm forehead.

They both silently turned to look out onto the black ocean, wrapped up within each other. 

“It’s so smooth,” she remarked.  
He hummed in agreement. “It almost looks like glass, doesn’t it? I’ve never seen it this way.”

Thomas lifted his head to the stars, the very same that had blazed overhead and bounded through the sky that night when she had nearly been turned away from him for good. They seemed to wink down on him then, reminiscent, with a sort of premonition that he could not decipher, and it filled him with a deep sense of dread he could not shake.

“There’s no moon, either,” she broke him of his reverie, and his eyes focused on the sphere of dull glow where the moon should have been, alight and gleaming. Somewhere within him, his foreboding worsened. 

It was only when Rose sniffled that he dared bring his mind away from the riddle he could not crack. He gently cupped her small, milky white face within his hands. “What do you need, Young Rose? Tell me. Anything, and it’s yours.”  
She did not take a moment to ponder. “You. You are all that I need. Please have me.” 

_____ _

The words meant so much all at once, multiple meanings entwined like intricate vines. That twinge in his spine was still present, but he smothered it and pressed his lips to hers. They exulted in their kiss, holding to each other like a lifeline, before he ripped his lips away and enshrouded her tightly into him, leading her to the safety of inside and his suite where they could love each other without a second thought. 

_____ _

No, Thomas Andrews had never been one for warmth. But he sorely missed its presence when even the touch of his beloved Young Rose did not bring it back to him in his state of mind as they walked. He felt the low glow of the absent moon and the blazing stars following him like a ghost, watching his every step and laughing evilly over his shoulder. It felt like an omen, and he shivered violently against a cold he finally felt. 

_____ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it, my loves. 
> 
> I truly hope you enjoyed. Of course, I am unsatisfied as always, but I hope you find joy in it. 
> 
> I'm 99.9% sure it's inaccurate but I couldn't help making Molly and Thomas friends of many years. It just feels so right!
> 
> I'll be back with you in a moment, my darlings.
> 
> I love you all so, so very much! I look forward to seeing what you think. :)
> 
> All my love, 
> 
> -Micayla <3


End file.
